SharePoint Site Usage Report Solution (2)

Here are the detailed implementation steps about the SharePoint 2003 Site Report Configuration and Deployment Guide on Contoso environment:

- Note: SP2010 has a web analysis service running at different levels and provide detailed web analysis OOTB. Now, in SP2013, it is not a SharePoint Service any more, instead it is integrated into Search service and is a standing alone feature with its own Content DB. From 2003 –> 2007 –> 2010 –> 2013, Web analysis is changed significantly. Although the component was changed dramatically, the Object Model is still similar, and approaches listed below are still useful and can be served as a solution design reference.

Pre-requirement and configuration check list:

1. Make sure that the logging report is turned on. Contoso should already be turned it on by default.
2. List all the sites that you wanted to see the usage report information.
3. Make sure using an administrator account, which also have at least View Usage Data permission for all the sites we want to monitor.

Deployment Guide:

1. On Contoso product server box, locate file folder under:  _\Templates\Admin\1033\, copy the script web page SitesUsageReport.aspx to the folder.
2. Navigate to Central Admin site, right after https://ContosoCentralAdmin/ add SiteusageRepport.aspx, and hit refresh button.
3. Wait for around 4-5 minutes (or whatever it takes to finish running the codes), the report will rendering on the web page
4. Use the browser to save it as a .xml file
5. Use excel 2010 tool to open the file and do analysis (sum, grouping, filtering) using excel tool.

Extra notes:

1. Using this script tool we can collect all the site pages/lists/document libraries data in past month.
2. The script is deployed on a Central Admin site so users would never have a chance to view this page –security is important.
3. Any error/exception is written to the web page to provide a friend error message information for debugging and trouble-shooting purpose.
4. This tool can be modified to get other usage reporting data, such as browser types to access Contoso sites, Users information to access Contoso, OS used to access the Contoso collaboration site, etc. As long as the SharePoint Object Model supported – scale up capability.
5. This tool also can be modified to do similar site usage reporting foe SharePoint 2007 and 2010 versions – scale out capability.
6. Since the testing environment I used has very limited site usage data, there might be some cases that would not be considered when it is running on Contoso portal. But it should not crash the server, since it is reading and query some content database tables.
7. To have a better performance result, suggest running this script at night, when there is less number of user access Contoso sites.