Since its inception in 2001, Microsoft SharePoint has been a prominent tool for enterprises and businesses. It offers some unparalleled benefits to organizations to make their business processes easy and smooth. SharePoint allows organizations to store, organize, manage, share and access crucial business information. Microsoft SharePoint is an easy-to-use, flexible, collaborative platform that serves as an intranet for companies where one can share information, schedule tasks, store contacts, and fulfil other things.
One of the advantages 
of Microsoft SharePoint is its unmatched single 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 easier, quicker and more accurate.
However, there is also a limitation of the SharePoint dashboard that we need to discuss. If you use the SharePoint dashboard, you’ve probably noticed that when you aggregate data from various web applications and integrated sites, the dashboard’s speed reduces and it takes more time to load.
Before we discuss the solution, let’s try to understand what a Microsoft SharePoint dashboard is.
What is a Microsoft SharePoint Dashboard?
A SharePoint dashboard is a feature of the Microsoft SharePoint platform that helps businesses see the most important information on a single page. A dashboard displays key performance indicators (KPIs) at a glance. This usually requires connecting to and aggregating data from various data sources into one, consolidated view.
The problem with this solution is that when you locate multiple “roll-up” web parts performing real-time aggregation on a SharePoint page, it significantly impacts the SharePoint page load time. Moreover, this affects the overall WFE servers’ performance. This causes your great-looking dashboard to stop from serving its single purpose: providing at a glance (meaning quick) view!
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 SharePoint Dashboard
First of all, a good dashboard should display 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.
Moreover, a good dashboard must load fast. Nobody likes to wait for a page to load. Now imagine you have a dashboard with 20 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. Additionally, this affects the WFE server performance for all other users as well.
Accordingly, dashboard speed is one of the most annoying limitations of the SharePoint dashboard. 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 end users start complaining about SharePoint being so slow.
What is the Ideal Solution to Overcome this SharePoint Dashboard Limitation?
Well, there are two things that you can do to enable a fast dashboard page without affecting your WFE server’s performance.
In most dashboard use-cases, users do not need to see real-time information. This is because the data itself does not change by the minute. Therefore, instead of overloading your WFE servers with multiple real-time, heavy aggregations you better choose a different strategy.
First, aggregate and process data offline and display cached data on your dashboard.
Then, perform the “heavy” aggregation process on a backend server, leaving your WFE resources available for faster user request handling. This way, your WFE servers’ performance will not be affected by any “heavy” aggregation and calculation tasks, as it happens when using various real-time aggregation web parts.
Say Hello to KWizCom’s List Aggregator Pro.
KWizCom is a well-known name offering a wide array of SharePoint solutions. The KWizCom List Aggregator Pro web part enables quick aggregation of data across different SharePoint sites and web applications. This product aggregates data from various web applications and SharePoint sites into a consolidated view in just a few seconds. No matter how complex data you have, this solution never disappoints you.
The product 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 back-end service called “Enterprise Aggregation Caching Feature”. This feature allows you to create multiple cross web application aggregation rules and configure their caching period. Then you connect the List Aggregator web part to the Enterprise Aggregation Caching Feature. This empowers users to view the results of super heavy aggregation in a few seconds! In the out-of-the-box SharePoint, such heavy aggregations take several minutes to process.
The List Aggregator supports all SharePoint editions. In addition, it also supports dynamic grouping and sorting by drag and drop. It offers superior editable skins and supports active column resizing. 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 frustrates you and slows your work. The SharePoint List Aggregator web part along with its Enterprise Aggregation Caching Feature addresses the slow dashboard loading issue once and for all. Get a competitive edge over others with these KWizCom SharePoint web parts that will help you to write your business’s growth story.
You might also be interested to read this blog article.
