SharePoint Tip of the Month

February 2010: Monitoring User Activity with SharePoint Usage and Audit Reports

It’s not sufficient to put together a great SharePoint portal if your intended users aren’t benefitting from your efforts. In this era where management decisions are metrics-driven and every web site has some kind of analytics attached, it is appropriate for SharePoint administrators to measure, monitor and promote the activity on their portals, too.

SharePoint 2007 offers several out-of-the box Usage and Audit reports worth considering.

Usage Reports

Finding out who is using your SharePoint portal, what sites and pages are being used the most and how users get to a site will allow you to make adjustments in the way you organize and deliver information. Sometimes the results may surprise you when you uncover significant traffic to a particular page or popularity of a certain search term for which there are limited results. Your role as the administrator is to publish this information to the line of business manager and let them determine how to respond. Providing them more robust details by fine tuning your search settings will generate quality data about the most common uses and search terms.

Audit reporting may be less sexy but is equally important for establishing value for and maintaining accurate and timely content in your portal. SharePoint out-of-the-box Auditing Reports include Content Activity Reports, Information Management Reports, Security and Site Settings Reports, and Custom Reports. All reports are produced in Excel for easy manipulation and file sharing.