Looking for tools to help simulate SharePoint user experience
Platform MOSS SharePoint 2007 Service Pack 1 A manager requested that we attempt to determine a baseline response time for users accessing our small SharePoint farm. The initial step that we took was to write a vbscript that creates an IE object, then provide to that object the URL of a word document that exists within one of the document libraries. The script gets a start time, then gets the time when the "open document" action returns, subtracts the two and calculates the time that it takes. The script runs every 30 minutes and writes the timing information out to a log file. When showing the resulting numbers to the manager, he is not convinced that the numbers we are getting reflect the average user experience. The script is running on two different user's desktops. I am wondering if other people have written similar scripts, or perhaps if there are other tools that admins use to gather this type of information. Thank you.
July 10th, 2012 8:50am

I think you need to talk to your manager to better understand sort of data he is looking for. User experience is more than just the length of time it takes for a Word document to be downloaded and opened (in fact in most cases, I don't care if the document takes a long time to open, as long as I can edit the document as necessary and it doesn't hang when I hit CTRL+S). Usually if you're wanting to know how the users find the experience, you ask them. A simple open-ended question that you ask to 5 people outside of IT like "How do you find using the SharePoint site?" or "How is your experience using the site?" will turn up a wealth of information about the average user experience (even with 5 people you'll probably find some overlap). It's usually helpful to have someone who is not known to be associated with the site ask the question so people don't hold back to prevent hurting your feelings. If you want to continue with the script (because perhaps your manager wants to understand the performance of the site), I would suggest creating a Performance Log to better understand the use and bottlenecks in the farm. Russ Maxwell from Microsoft has a blog post about this: Configuring Performance Monitor Log for SharePoint Performance Issues. Jason Warren Infrastructure Specialist Habanero Consulting Group habaneroconsulting.com/blog
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July 10th, 2012 11:17am

In further discussions, he has indicated that users are reporting that it takes too long to open documents stored in SharePoint, so he is wanting us to determine how long it is taking when things are "running good" and have the script running when people also are seeing the same document taking minutes instead of seconds to open. Thank you for the recommendation about the survey - informal contact with a lot of users results in most of them saying variations of "SharePoint used to be quick, but not it is pretty slow". I will check out the performance log article you provided. Thank you again!
July 10th, 2012 12:39pm

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