Sponsored by KWizCom
Since 2001, Microsoft SharePoint has been a prominent tool for enterprises and businesses. It offers many benefits to organizations to make their business processes smooth and painless. SharePoint also allows storing, organizing, sharing, and accessing crucial business information. Furthermore, it can be used for document sharing, business intelligence, advanced search for content, content collaboration, and many other things.
Microsoft SharePoint is a dynamic, user-friendly, collaborative platform that serves as an intranet for companies where stakeholders can share information, schedule tasks, manage contacts, and give other stakeholders permissions in the organizational hierarchy.
One of the biggest advantages of Microsoft SharePoint is its dashboard with centralized administration. The dashboard allows organizations to evaluate aggregated data from multiple sites and integrated web applications in a consolidated view. It makes decision-making much faster, simpler, and more accurate.
However, we also need to mention the limitation of the SharePoint dashboard. If you use the SharePoint dashboard, you must have noticed that when aggregating data from various web applications and sites, the dashboard’s speed reduces considerably and it takes longer to load.
Before we talk about the solution, let’s understand what a Microsoft SharePoint dashboard is.
What is a Microsoft SharePoint Dashboard?
A SharePoint dashboard within the Microsoft SharePoint platform allows businesses to display the most important information on one centralized page. You don’t need to visit multiple internal web applications to access information related to a specific subject. Instead, the dashboard aggregates valuable and significant data from integrated web applications and other systems and displays on the dashboard.
With an interactive dashboard, you can easily verify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These KPIs can play a pivotal role in determining business strategies, evaluating and amending existing strategies and campaigns, and making data-driven business decisions for organizations.
Here, a dashboard can pull quantifiable data from different, multiple systems and provide a graphical summary to help stakeholders make business decisions.
A good dashboard
A good dashboard is highly responsive, quick, and displays results in no time. It helps stakeholders to make decisions quickly after understanding the whole picture and the central business bottlenecks.
A good dashboard first of all displays summary data, aggregation & calculation results.
The data may be stored in separate SharePoint sites, site collections, and web applications.
Various KPIs and calculated results displayed may require running a “heavy” query process across many thousands of items, scattered across many site collections.
Secondly, a good SharePoint dashboard must load fast
Nobody likes to wait for a page to load.
Now picture this: you have a dashboard with 30 different indicators, tables, and charts — each requires a “heavy” query to run plus some calculation to be processed on the returned results.
This affects the page load time for users who browse the dashboard page and affects the WFE server performance for all other users as well!
One of the most significant and most annoying limitations of the SharePoint dashboard is its speed. When you locate multiple web parts performing real-time aggregation tasks on a SharePoint page, you will find that the dashboard will become slow in functioning. So don’t be surprised when the SharePoint end-users complain about SharePoint being so slow.
What is the ideal solution to overcome this limitation?
There are a couple of things that we can do to enable a fast dashboard page without affecting our WFE server’s performance.
First, we should aggregate and process data offline and display cached data on your dashboard
Most of the time, dashboard data does not have to be real-time data.
If, for example, I am watching a Sales dashboard that displays monthly sales performance indicators, there shouldn’t be a problem with displaying cached data that is refreshed every hour, right?
Secondly, we should perform the “heavy” aggregation process on a backend server
This way, our WFE servers’ performance won’t be affected by “heavy” aggregation and calculation tasks which happens when using various real-time aggregation web parts.
Say hello to KWizCom’s List Aggregator Pro
KWizCom offers a wide array of SharePoint solutions to enterprises and businesses. The KWizCom List Aggregator Pro web part is a product that will enable quick aggregation of data across different SharePoint sites and web applications.
The List Aggregator aggregates data from web applications and SharePoint sites into a single view in several seconds. No matter how complex your data is, this solution never disappoints you.
The SharePoint List Aggregator is designed to allow you true aggregation capabilities with superior skins and AJAX-based inline editing capabilities without impacting your WFE server’s performance.
How does the SharePoint List Aggregator work?
KWizCom’s List Aggregator Pro. Edition for SharePoint 2013-2019 includes a configurable backend service called “Enterprise Aggregation Caching Feature” which enables SharePoint users to create multiple cross-web application aggregation rules and configure their caching period. Next the List Aggregator web part can be connected to the Enterprise Aggregation Caching Feature. This empowers users to view the results of very heavy aggregation in a few seconds. In the out-of-the-box SharePoint, such heavy aggregations take several minutes to process.
KWizCom’s SharePoint List Aggregator supports all SharePoint editions. In addition to that, it also supports dynamic grouping and sorting by drag and drop. It offers superior editable skins and supports active column resizing as well. It also promotes cross-size aggregation and aggregates lists and libraries by content type.
Conclusion
This is what you have been looking for! Get rid of the slow dashboard loading time that you are annoyed with. The SharePoint List Aggregator web part along with its Enterprise Aggregation Caching Feature addresses the slow dashboard loading issue once and for all!
Featured image: Pixabay
