Guest Blogspot by Tony Pekala – VP of Tech Services at RDA Corporation

Let me start by saying thanks Adam for the guest blog spot.  I’m excited to blog about a new product that we have been developing called ECAL Tracker.   It’s an add on solution to Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to help with Enterprise feature usage monitoring in MOSS. 

As a Microsoft Systems Integrator partner, RDA has done work with hundreds of MOSS customers over the last few years.  In that time we have helped customers use and deploy MOSS effectively into their environments.  One of the problems that we see customers struggle with is Client Access Licensing (CALs).   Current licensing requires that customers pick between Standard and Enterprise versions of MOSS.  The Enterprise features (Business Data Catalog, Excel Services, Report Center, or InfoPath Forms Services) provide tremendous capabilities for clients, however choosing Enterprise requires a separate purchase of Enterprise CAL’s (ECAL’s) for each enterprise user.   The easy (but more expensive) solution to this problem is to buy an ECAL for everyone in the organization.  However, in large enterprise accounts with thousands of users, this may not be cost effective or feasible.  MOSS 2007 does not provide tools to monitor CAL/ECAL usage making it hard to customers to control their usage.  This has caused many customers to hold off deploying Enterprise MOSS and limiting their ability to leverage their investment by taking advantage of the most powerful capabilities of MOSS.

The best SharePoint minds at RDA came up with a solution to solve this problem.  Our approach allows customers to report on the usage of Enterprise features within a MOSS farm.  With this reporting information, customers can validate their ECAL usage to ensure applications that should use Enterprise Services are in fact doing so, and those applications or users that may not need the services are not, thus managing the deployment of ECAL’s efficiently, as well as monitoring their compliance with their licensing agreements. 

The solution is a standalone product that installs itself as a MOSS application.   There are 4 components to the solution:

·         Logging – log each usage of an Enterprise feature into a SQL Server database

·         Reporting -  canned reports that can be accessed by an authorized user to generate information about the access of MOSS enterprise services

o   The ECAL tracker product has five canned reports:

·         Total Enterprise Usage – This report shows summary counts of users using enterprise feature group by enterprise feature category.

·         User Usage Summary Report – This lists every user who has accessed an enterprise feature and shows the count of the number of times they have accessed an enterprise feature group by category.

·         User Usage Detail Report – This report lists the exact feature that was used by the user and the time it was accessed.

·         Enterprise Feature Summary Report – This lists every enterprise feature that has been recorded by the ECAL Tracker and the number of times it has been used.

·         Enterprise Feature Usage Detail Report – This lists all the users that have accessed a specific enterprise feature and the time it was accessed.

o   Reports can be filtered by web application and for a particular timeframe and can be exported to Excel and PDF

·         Crawling – crawl the MOSS Farm and identify all Enterprise Services.  (This feature can be scheduled for off hours execution)

·         Administration – provide an easy way to turn on and off logging and crawling

From the beginning we stressed that this product not impact MOSS performance.  To validate this requirement, we spent several weeks testing our solution in one of Microsoft’s Technology Centers.  Microsoft’s MTC has available hardware labs with all the horsepower you need to do a great stress test.  We put the solution through a series of load and stress tests that would be more then equivalent to the largest MOSS farms installed at customer sites today. 

The product is now in Beta test and we are working with customers to get their feedback.  Any customers who are interested in beta testing can email (me) Tony Pekala at pekala@rdacorp.com.    Also, participating beta customers will receive a single farm license with 1 year of paid up support in return for their help and support.

We are very excited to roll this product out to the MOSS community worldwide. We think it fills a need by IT management to best use their resources and assets during this time of economic challenge. We are convinced the information from this tool will support RDA’s mission of assisting our client’s IT management to effectively use information and technology tools that make their businesses better.

For more information please see RDA’s website for details.