Analysis of SharePoint 2007 Usage Reporting Capabilities

An element of site usage reporting is included as part of the ‘out of the box’ capabilities of SharePoint 2007. After usage reporting is enabled by your site administrator, you can append ‘_layouts/usagedetails.aspx’ onto any SharePoint site to get access to site usage data, provided you have the appropriate level of permissions.
For example: http:///_layouts/usagedetails.aspx

According to Microsoft, Site administrators and site collection administrators can view site usage summary pages that have the following information for their sites and site collections:

• Requests and queries in the last day and the last 30 days.
• Average number of requests per day over the last 30 days.
• A chart of requests per day over the last 30 days.
• A list of the top page requests over the last 30 days.
• A list of top users over the last 30 days.
• A chart of top referring hosts over the last 30 days.
• A chart of top referring pages over the last 30 days.
• A list of top destination pages over the last 30 days.
• Top queries for the last 30 days (if search usage reporting is enabled).
• Search results top destination pages (if search usage reporting is enabled).

SSP administrators for the search service can view a search usage reports page that tracks the following information.

• Number of queries per day over the previous 30 days.
• Number of queries per month over the previous 12 months.
• Top queries over the previous 30 days.
• Top site collections originating queries over the previous 30 days.
• Queries per search scope over the previous 30 days.

Site collection administrators for the SSP site can view a usage summary page that tracks the following information:

• Total amount of storage used by the site collection.
• Percent of storage space used by Web Discussions.
• Maximum storage space allowed.
• Number of users for all sites in the hierarchy.
• Total hits and recent bandwidth usage across all sites.

Site collection administrators can also view a site usage report that includes monthly and daily page hit totals filtered by the following criteria:

• Page
• User
• Operating system
• Browser
• Referrer URL

Usage Reporting from SharePoint Designer 2007

SharePoint Designer 2007 extends the functionality available in SharePoint, enabling you to measure site performance and usage using the following OOTB reports:

• Site summary report
• Broken links reports
• Reports about files
• Reports about shared content
• Reports about problems
• View the Usage Summary report
• View details usage reports
• Chart your usage data results

Most reports can be customised with the addition of sorting and filtering, copied and saved as an external file, such as Microsoft Excel.

For further information read ‘Use reports to measure site performance and usage’:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/ha101741361033.aspx

Third Party alternatives to the SharePoint 2007 Usage Reporting Solutions

• MAPIlab provides a tool that delivers richer stats:
http://www.mapilab.com/sharepoint/statistics/

• Nintex Reporting provides richer reporting on usage:
http://www.nintex.com/Nproducts/Reporting.aspx

• Quest Capacity Management reporting tool has some interesting reports, including growth and trending reports:
http://www.quest.com/capacity-manager-for-sharepoint/

• CardioLog Usage Reports for SharePoint
http://www.intlock.com

• AvePoint DocAve for SharePoint 2007
http://uk.avepoint.com/sharepoint-products/

• Google analytics can be used by SharePoint sites and it’s free. CWaC are trialling this:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Broken links Scan

Scan broken links functionality in MOSS 2007 can only scan the broken links for sites created under the site directory. SharePoint Designer has a Broken Links report, but it’s poor and includes an awful lot of system files that you probably don’t want to know about.

A good alternative is Xenu’s Link Slueth and it’s available for free download too, from: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html