SharePoint Reporting

SharePoint Reporting to Evaluate Usage and Activity

For Microsoft Sharepoint environments, you need to gain insight into your activity, trends, storage and much more. A SharePoint reporting tool should let you analyze all aspects of the usage of your farm. You should be able to report into the activity – who is accessing what; the growth of the number of sites, report on how much storage key sites use, find sites that are using the most storage, and even determine where Web Parts are being used.

Isolate SharePoint sites that are no longer needed and delete them

How important to you are sites that have no activity over a period of time – or sites that only one user is accessing? With the right SharePoint reporting tool, you can analyze both the activity and the storage used on any sites so you can determine how important those sites are to your enterprise. It’s not uncommon to setup a site or set of sites for a particular project but they are no longer needed after the project finished. How do you know when the project is completed? Are those sites now sitting dormant? Maybe there are sites that users thought they needed but then never used. What about sites using the most storage? You should leverage a SharePoint reporting product to be able to analyze both your site activity and storage to get a better picture of what’s going on.

Determine who is accessing which SharePoint documents

What better way to determine what information is valuable in your environment than by monitoring user activity? With the right SharePoint reporting product it’s easy to determine exactly who is accessing which documents. You’ll want to be able to see all the users that are accessing each document or see all the documents a particular user has accessed. Maybe you need to determine whether one of the biggest documents on a site is really valuable. With the right SharePoint reporting tool, you can see who has been looking at it.

Find Sites with the most activity or least activity or storage

Ever wonder which sites are getting the most activity? Or how about which sites get no use at all? Maybe it’s time to re-organize or cleanup your sites. You should be able to analyze the activity at any level in the SharePoint hierarchy, including pages, documents or across disparate web applications. An SharePoint activity report should tell you the total number of requests for the period you’re analyzing, as well as the average users per day, the size and the quota. A SharePoint reporting product can analyze page activity which would tell you the top pages, who’s been accessing them and where they came from.

Anticipate growth of your SharePoint farm by monitoring the growth of sites, storage and activity

As your users become more familiar with SharePoint, the usage of your environment will naturally grow. You should keep track of your SharePoint site growth as well as your site usage, including the growth of storage and the activity on sites, site collections or web applications so you can manage this growth accordingly. You should get a SharePoint report on your environment so you can perform a historic analysis for any period of time, giving you the insight to anticipate the needs of your users and to get a better handle on how your SharePoint farm is performing.

SharePoint Web Part Usage

Before making a change to any web part, you should know which sites are using it. Unfortunately, with SharePoint, there isn’t any place to go for that information. Third party SharePoint reporting tools can help provide an analysis of web part usage so you can identify which sites are using each web part, as well as all the web parts being used by each site. Details like when the web part was created, modified, last updated, size and more can go a long way to help manage your environment.