My colleage Inma and I have been wrassling with the SharePoint web site metrics recently. You guessed it - it’s the Out of the Box site reporting that you get, well, out of the box with MOSS.
J&J also uses WebTrends - and we have an account, but we have discovered some odd discrepancies between WebTrends and SharePoint data. Our Portal was also not originally coded to “work” with Web Trends - so while the pages now contain the Web Trends tracking code required, it is still difficult to use WebTrends reporting to report on a site-by-site basis across the site collections.
Since our initial view of the OOB SharePoint site useage reporting looked promising - we’ve been focusing on that solution for our Web site metrics. As part of this process we have come across some limitations with the site use reports that, if rectified, would make the SharePoint Web metrics reporting much better:
- Historic reporting – if we don’t grab the site useage summary data each month we lose it – and we can’t run reports like in Web Trends to get old data from the past few months. Some history is there, but not every number.
- User organizational and geographic information: Someone asked if we can know where users are coming from – in Web Trends this sort of works – not in SharePoint at all, as far as I can see. We do see userid’s - but we have no mapping to organization or region. I have a sneaking suspicion that this may be a J&J employee directory issue, not a SharePoint issue (just a small hunch) since the user ID’s are available, but in Active Directory it does not appear that regional and organizational information is associated with user ID’s. But I’m not sure anyone has really thought about the importance of this as part of the overall SharPoint architecture.
- Data behind the charts: SharePoint shows nice charts but in many cases we can’t “see” the data to get the number behind the chart – so we are guessing what number the bar is at – which is kinda silly. Maybe this is an easy fix – perhaps at the Admin level there are more capabilities with respect to reporting, but at our level - even with site colleciton administrator access, I don’t see this.
- “Rolling up” site reporting: Many organizations use SharePoint in a cluster of team sites - starting at a top site that representes the overall sub-organization. The managers of these organizations would love to get a sense of their activity and use for their organizations - but to get this we have to manually add up all site useage data from each site at and below that “parent” sub-site. It would be great to have a tool that would allow site reporting from very exact spots within a site collection. For example - starting at a point in the site collection tree and rolling up everything below it.
- Exit and entry information: It would be great to know what the entry pages and exit pages are of the visitors, and how long on average they spend in each site (that’s something that Webtrends is providing now).
- Tracking Collaborative behavior: While hits and visits are indicators of use, they are not indiciators of participation and collaborative behavior. Collaboration can be measured by tracking contribution: e.g. discussion replies, blog comments and wiki participation. However, natively SharePoint does not support reporting on collaborative activity.
Love to hear thoughts on other experiences with metrics and SharePoint for your sites, especially suggestions for solutions that make SharePoint metrics better!
