Hello! My name is Alisa Swann, and I'm a Microsoft SharePoint Technology Specialist located here in the Chicago area. I've had several customers recently ask me what Usage Anaylsis Tools are available for SharePoint. Before I begin with providing (what I hope to be) some helpful information on the topic, I first must tell everyone what a complete wild goose chase I've been on to gather information on this topic. I was a bit discouraged when I read Joel Oleson's Blog Post about Usage Reporting and it began with, "I've been clamoring for a SharePoint Reporting solution. Sure the SharePoint Usage reports are cute for the site administrator such as the search reports, and viewing the audit logs on a site. If you aren't even seeing site usage data this troubleshooting page might be helpful. Note there is the WSS usage processing AND the MOSS shared service for Usage processing that both need to be enabled... but what about farm reports?" Pasted from <http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/09/28/sharepoint-reporting-solution.aspx>
But the good news is, there are some great solutions available, plus some goodies on CodePlex as well…so let me share my findings…
SharePoint Usage Reports
· First things first, if you'd like to review the built in site usage reports and you need instructions on how to enable these, here are some details on Microsoft TechNet…(including the references in Joel's blog post above): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262541.aspx.
· If you're interested in seeing what these reports look like, Ian Morrish has published some screenshots on his blog at: http://www.wssdemo.com/XPS/Forms/AllItems.aspx.
· There are additional ways of capturing more information than what the default reports provide by parsing the SharePoint usage logs. Here's a link to a great tool, written by Leonid Lyublinski, which can help: Usage Analysis Processing logs.
Now you may find that these reports leave you wanting to know much more about your SharePoint Site Usage. That is what I've been hearing from many customers, which is what lead me to research the topic.
SharePoint Usage Analytics Solutions
I began my search with Microsoft adCenter Analytics. Wouldn't it be great if there was an integration with SharePoint! I've heard there is currently a private beta for customers to test adCenter with SharePoint Internet facing sites, so if you're interested in beta testing, definitely let us know. I haven't heard much on whether or not intranet sites could benefit from adCenter. Nonetheless, we'll be sure to keep an eye on the beta and blog about the details when available (also, check out Ian's post about Moving from Google Analytics to Microsoft adCenter Analytics).
Then I thought it would be good to know what our own Microsoft IT team is using to analyze our internal SharePoint site usage. I spoke with someone in IT and he shared some great information about how they selected WebTrends for their site reporting solution (he also mentioned that he has been talking to a lot of customers about his experience and if you're ever up in Redmond for an Executive Briefing, feel free to request a session on how Microsoft is analyzing internal SharePoint sites). WebTrends generates up to 80 reports and allows MSIT to analyze very useful metrics which they then share with the business groups. For example, if the reports show that the common path to a useful bit of HR related content is three clicks deep on the HR web site, they share this with HR and encourage them to publish a link to the doc on the HR home page. This will then help users spend less time finding what they need and potentially more time on your site reading about other useful information. And the most important thing of all here - you've just gained a return visitor because of their good experience = increased adoption.
While that was very interesting, there must be other solutions available for this type of reporting need. I started my search outside the walls of Microsoft and heard about a Microsoft Partner, Nintex, and their plans to release a robust reporting solution for SharePoint - Nintex Reporting 2008. I saw a brief demo of the beta and this could truly become the "be all end all" for SharePoint Usage Reporting. The Nintex solution collects usage and performance information from logs, IIS and perfmon; and visualizes that information in Microsoft Silverlight based reporting dashboards. The Silverlight aspect gives reporting a whole new WOW factor. We'll definitely keep an eye on Nintex Reporting 2008 and blog about that as well.
In Summary
Overall, I was impressed with the options available for gathering SharePoint usage metrics. I hope that customers are entertaining the idea of gathering this type of information in their SharePoint environments to really understand if they are getting value out of their investment. This will help to identify where user adoption challenges lie, what are the common trends and behaviors, etc. - all of which is very important information for administrators of the site and business owners as well.
I hope my efforts to gather and document this data on SharePoint Usage Analytics helps. Before I sign off, I wanted to highlight another reporting tool I found on CodePlex:
MSIT SharePoint Reporting Framework
MSITSRF doesn't address usage analysis detail; It is more geared towards an operations tool to help better support SharePoint for an operations /IT Team.
Here's the summary; it looks very interesting:
"Since the release of MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0 to the world there has been a gap in operational level metrics and global service metrics. At MSIT we decided to fill that gap with what we call the MSIT SharePoint Reporting Framework. Since beta 2 we have been building and tuning scripts that we use internally to gather various metrics. Information is definitely power, with these numbers it gives you the ability to really keep your finger on the pulse of your SharePoint infrastructure. "