Usage Reports

Out-of-the-box SharePoint usage reports include a variety of metrics: usage summary, requests, users, referrers, home page, destination pages, search queries, and search results. Find out who is using your SharePoint portal, what sites and pages are being used the most, and how users get to a site. Fine tune your search settings by looking at the most common search terms.

Site usage reports can be found via a hyperlink on the Site Settings page under the Site Administration heading. Users must have Admin rights or at a minimum View Usage Data rights to the site to access the usage reports. To configure usage reporting, a farm administrator must first enable Windows SharePoint Services usage logging, then enable and configure the usage reporting service. Site collection administrators can then activate the reporting feature to enable usage reports.

Audit Reports

Out-of-the-box SharePoint auditing reports include Content Activity reports, Information Management reports, Security and Site Settings reports, and Custom Reports.

Audit log reports are Excel reports. They can be found via a hyperlink on the Site Settings page under the Site Collection Administration heading. Users must have Admin rights to the site to access these reports. In addition, Site Collection Audit settings under the Site Collection Administration heading must be enabled.

3rd Party SharePoint Reporting
If SharePoint out-of-the-box usage and audit reports are not sufficient for your organization, you may want to purchase a 3rd party SharePoint reporting tool.

Quest’s Site Administrator offers over 30 user-friendly usage and auditing SharePoint reports. For a list of reports, go to www.quest.com/site-administrator-for-sharepoint

Nintex Reporting offers everyone from system administrators to business owners access to online reports and key information dashboards. Nintex Reporting surpasses the traditional reporting experience, providing interactive web-based charts. Users can hover over a data point to focus on specific information, drill-down and scroll through pages of data in an instant. Details on Nintex reports can be found at www.Nintex.com/reporting

 What is a SharePoint taxonomy?

Taxonomy is the practice of classification. It is used to organize information and make it easier to find.

SharePoint 2007, as one of the leading content management systems, offers several taxonomy features to make information more searchable.  The core taxonomy features in SharePoint are content types and columns.

If you are familiar with document management, content types correspond to document types and columns are metadata.

 What are the benefits of a SharePoint taxonomy?

The truth is your site hierarchy defines your taxonomy. Without planning, the more information you have on your SharePoint portal, the harder it will be to find it. Some say ‘Taxonomy is key to making SharePoint scalable’.

Benefits of a planned SharePoint taxonomy include:

• Easier information retrieval  A taxonomy provides a consistent way of classifying and describing information, allowing more accurate search results and giving users the ability to rapidly locate the content that they need.
• Easier navigation A taxonomy dictates how users navigate SharePoint sites and various sub-sites.
• Audience targeting By effectively leveraging content types, search results can be tailored to specific audiences within an organization.

 How do I implement a solid SharePoint taxonomy?

Implementing a solid SharePoint taxonomy consists of categorizing the content of your sites and deciding how users will locate that content. 

Here are several ways to improve your taxonomy:

• Define content types and metadata at the site level

SharePoint uses content types to describe a collection of metadata. For example, an Invoice content type may contain metadata such as buyer, date of sale, terms of delivery, order total, etc…

Define content types and metadata (columns) at the site level, not the library level, whenever possible.

so they can be re-used across libraries to enforce document tagging and consistency throughout a site and sub-sites.

• Maximize the use of built-in, automatic metadata

Avoid blank document titles and irrelevant link titles.

• Avoid using a lot of sub-sites and redundant content

Create a link-driven user interface using site columns to avoid storing similar content in multiple places.

• Add a 3^rd party SharePoint taxonomy tool

If the built-in SharePoint taxonomy features are not enough for your organization, look at 3^rd party tools such as SharePoint Tagging by KWizCom, RAPID from Artemis, or SharePart XXL.

 If you just want a simple way to get started with taxonomy, familiarize yourself with content types and metadata to ensure a successful SharePoint implementation. While I am a great believer in using content types with the right amount of metadata, do not ask users for too much data which may lead to documents being tagged incorrectly and user frustration. Very simply, when determining the right amount of metadata, ask your users ‘If you wanted to perform a search for this content, what parameters would you use?’  Some metadata is already built into SharePoint such Document name, Title, Created, Created by, Modified by, and the rest will need to be created.

 So in summary, don’t ignore the importance of SharePoint taxonomy features or you will discover later that users have managed content using their own taxonomy, also called folksonomy, making information difficult to manage across departments.

SharePoint 2010 will require a 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005 or 2008, and will run on Windows Server 2008. It will have a tremendous number of new features. In fact, SharePoint 2010 will be the most tweaked member of the Office 2010 suite. Lots of exciting new features, but my favorite is by far the long-awaited support of non-Microsoft browsers.

Here is a list of SharePoint 2010 new key features:

1. Ribbon/icon-based user interface (similar to Office).
2. Easier Web Edit interface.
3. Silverlight Web Part to view interactive rich text content.
4. Firefox and Safari browser support.
5. Business Connectivity Services (formerly Business Data Catalog) – Wizard-based CRUD operations, conversion of external data to SharePoint lists, offline data access using SharePoint Workspaces, built-in browser for SQL database views and stored procedures.
6. Ability to read Visio documents in browser (no Visio client installation required).
7. Richer themes – support of PowerPoint themes.
8. Improved Central Administration – new Admin user interface, Best Practices analyzer, richer usage reporting and logging analytics, large list resource throttling, snapshot backup and recovery, granular recovery at item level.
9. Faster Search engine.
10. Additional built-in Workflows.
11. Provisioning Workflow support in SharePoint Designer.
12. Improved Mobile Device interface.
13. SharePoint Workspaces (formerly Groove) or offline libraries.
14. Improved SharePoint developer features in Visual Studio 2010 – Visual SharePoint Web Part Designer, SharePoint Server Explorer, LINQ objects to query SharePoint lists and more.
If you are concerned about the pain and cost of upgrading, Microsoft has committed to a painless upgrade from SharePoint 2007 (MOSS), since the architecture has not changed as it did between SharePoint 2003 and 2007.

What about the free Windows SharePoint Services? Microsoft has assured us that there will be WSS 4.0, but details on the new SharePoint 2010 features that will be available with WSS still need to be revealed.

SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 have built-in support for mobile views. Every list and library can be easily set up to host mobile views. Standards views can be made mobile-enabled via the Admin screen and accessed by adding /m on the end of the URL.

Yes, you can effortlessly extend SharePoint functionality to iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile devices. But you will find that the SharePoint native mobile interface is limited. The average SharePoint page is difficult to use on a mobile device. Everything is so small, it’s difficult to navigate.

So, if you want more, you will need to go beyond SharePoint out-of-the box mobile functionality. Microsoft suggests 2 kinds of customization that you can make to the pages used to access SharePoint through mobile devices:

1. Create mobile pages from scratch and redirect users to these pages.
2. Override existing SharePoint mobile control template to create a unique mobile Home or View page.

If it sounds like too much to create and maintain new custom mobile pages, there is Mobile Entrée, a server-side plug-in for Microsoft SharePoint that requires no installation on the mobile devices. Your SharePoint administrator can simply install Mobile Entrée on your server and your mobile workers will be able to instantly access SharePoint content in a more intuitive and productive manner.

Mobile Entrée Basic plug-in provides access to SharePoint lists, documents libraries, discussion boards and search without having to write any code. If that’s not enough to meet your mobile users’ needs, Mobile Entrée offers a rich, easy-to-use API that lets developers build their own custom mobile SharePoint applications. All development and deployment can be done from Visual Studio as Mobile Entrée lives along SharePoint Webparts.

SharePoint workflows can provide your organization better control, more efficiency, and increased accountability over your processes.

1. CONTROL
By incorporating business processes in SharePoint sites, managers can control how information moves through their organization. Workflows embed processes into document and form libraries to control and manage the flow of information. Forms and documents can automatically be routed for approval.

SharePoint workflows can incorporate task assignments, email notifications, due dates, task escalations and re-assignments. Workflow tasks are delivered to each participant via eMail. Everyone knows the tasks assigned, when they were assigned, and each task status. Document workflows reward organizations with a better understanding of the organization’s structure, and formalized procedures that stay with the organization, even if the employees who created the process leave.

2. EFFICIENCY
Everyone knows the frustration and confusion that result from informal document approval processes. SharePoint workflows automatically manage document reviews and approvals, allowing users to focus on task completion, making processes more efficient. In addition, companies can monitor the time it takes to execute business functions and create productivity measurements for continuous process improvement.

Workflows automatically drive business processes ensuring that the right people have the right tasks, the right information and the authority to get the job done in a very effective and time-efficient manner.

3. ACCOUNTABILITY
With SharePoint workflows, you can avoid the information black hole of informal processes. Unlike unstructured eMail related tasks, workflow tasks cannot be lost, ignored, or deleted. Tasks must be addressed in a timely manner or they may be automatically escalated to a manager. Service levels can now be tracked. And in many cases, service levels may be improved as a result of the increased efficiency provided by workflows. SharePoint workflows provide the structure needed for individual accountability by making employees accountable for the completion of their tasks.

As companies grow, the disparate applications users need to remain productive become scattered across the corporate network. As a result, users often need to access two or more systems to perform their daily tasks. If you are already using SharePoint 2007, why not use SharePoint as your enterprise portal platform to aggregate access to all applications and information? It can improve employee productivity and lower your IT maintenance costs.

The problem with integrating applications is that their user interfaces (UIs) vary widely. Some applications are Web-enabled – these are typically the easiest to integrate, some are Client/Server ‘thick client’, and others are legacy ‘green screen’ applications. In addition, some are custom built and others are packaged applications. The approach that you take will depend on the types of applications you are trying to integrate, the level of integration you are looking to achieve, your version of SharePoint, and your budget.

Following are the most popular options for integrating existing applications into SharePoint 2007:

1. Page Viewer Web Part
SharePoint has a built-in Page Viewer Web Part that inserts an iFrame into a Web Part page, providing the ability to run another Web application within SharePoint. If you want the wrapped application to look like the rest of your SharePoint portal, you can set a reference to the CSS file. This is the fastest and easiest integration approach but your application must have a Web interface and must be compatible with iFrame elements.

2. Integration Web Parts
Microsoft offers a free WSRP Web Part Toolkit for SharePoint that can display Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) provided by a variety of vendors. In addition, a Web Part toolkit for SAP iViews is also available. These Web Parts are very helpful to connect to non-Microsoft and packaged applications. Some vendors, such as IBM and Vignette, have written WSRP portlets to facilitate SharePoint integration, so be sure to check with your application vendor before embarking on a custom solution.

3. Business Data Catalog
If you are running the Enterprise version of MOSS, you can use Business Data Catalog Web Parts to aggregate multiple data sources into SharePoint. This is helpful if you want to display data from more than one application into an aggregated view but it is read-only so it will not work if your users need to edit the data.

4. Excel Services
Excel Services allows you to present an Excel document, or a portion thereof, in SharePoint without requiring users to have the Excel client. This is excellent for the presentation of data or graphs but it is read-only and only comes with MOSS enterprise.

5. Citrix Presentation Server
Citrix offers a Presentation Server’s Web Interface that includes a native SharePoint Web Part that provides access to existing applications without coding. This solution is great for Client/Server applications.

6. Custom Interface
The most flexible option available is to build a custom interface inside of SharePoint. Custom integration can come in many forms, from the construction of one or more Web Parts to the building of SharePoint Web pages using Visual Studio .NET. This solution is great if you need highly customized views for your applications, or none of the above solutions work and you have the budget for custom development. This is a more complex and expensive solution but can provide you exactly what you need.