Enable usage analysis / tracing in SharePoint
Sharepoint own “google analytics”.
Knowing what users look at what what they do not look at it important for any website owners.
This is true for sharepoint just as much as any other site.
Even if your sharepoint site is an intranet or extranet it’s important to know what the users DO on the site.
We have recently added a site where our different companies can purchase excess items from each others warehouses.
In these financial times trimming the stockpiles can be a wise decision.
What we want to know is how many actually look at each others stock.
So basically we are looking at setting up usage analysis and tracing on our SharePoint extranet.
This will be done using the builtin “SharePoint Analytics” and then Google Analytics.
Google analytics can’t tell us which users visit the commodity exchange, but SharePoints own statistics will be useful for that.
This post will only discuss setting up “Usage Analysis Processing” in WSS and “Advanced Usage Analysis Processing” in MOSS, not the google analytics. I will discuss googles solution in a later post.
To enable Usage Analysis there are 3 steps:
1: Enable Usage Analysis Logging And Processing in WSS:
Windows SharePoint Services Usage logging and Usage Analysis Processing must be enabled.
When this is done, the actual logging starts. SharePoint will create folders in the 12\LOGS folder that is named by a GUID. The in that folder will be subfolders that contain logs for each day.
The logs don’t help you much unless you can look through them, and that is exactly what the Analysis Processing does. When the Processing is executed once per day, the logs will be parsed and the data will be added to the Content Database. From here reports will be made.
2: Enable Usage Reporting
There isn’t much in regards to Reports at this point. We are now using only the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 reporting which is pretty minimal. The real reporting power lies in MOSS, so a farm administrator must go enable Usage Reporting in the SSP part of Central Administration.
These reports are much better, and supplements Google Analytics quite well.
3: Activate the Usage Reporting
After the reporting has been enabled, the site collection administrators for each site collection must go activate the feature.
Only when the feature has been activated, the reports will be available for that site collection.
Enable Usage Analysis Logging And Processing in WSS:
1: Go to Central Administration and select the Operations tab
2: Under “Logging and Reporting”, Click the Usage Analysis Processing link.
3: In the Logging Settings part, Enable logging by clicking the checkbox.
4: If you don’t type in a log file location it will be using 12\LOGS per default. This will do just fine. If you change this, you will need to make sure the correct permissions are created for the folder. In 12\LOGS the permissions are already set up.
5: Under Processing Settings, click the checkbox and choose when to run the usage processing. The timeframe is when it should start processing. Choose to do it during the night.
Enable usage reporting:
1: Go to Central Administration and select the SharedServices1 (or whatever you called it) link.
2: Under Office SharePoint Usage Reporting, click the Usage Reporting Link.
3: Select Enable advanced usage analysis processing. This sounds like it will do the processing instead of WSS, but in fact it does not. It just adds on reporting functionality.
4: If you want to analyse search queries, select Enable search query logging.
Activate the Usage Reporting:
1: Go to Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Modify all site settings -> Site collection features
2: Click Activate next to the feature called Reporting.
You are now able to look at those nifty reports. They are scattered all around.
There’s reports for sites, site collections and search.
Knowing what users look at and what they do not look at is important for any website owners.
This is true for sharepoint just as much as any other site.
Even if your sharepoint site is an intranet or extranet it’s important to know what the users do on the site.
We have recently added a site where our different companies can purchase exces timber from each others warehouses.
In these financial times trimming the stockpiles can be a wise decision.
What we want to know is how many actually look at each others stock.
So basically we are looking at setting up usage analysis and tracing on our SharePoint extranet.
This will be done using the builtin “SharePoint Analytics” and then Google Analytics.
Google analytics can’t tell us which users visit the commodity exchange, but SharePoints own statistics will be useful for that.
This post will only discuss setting up Usage Analysis Processing in WSS and Advanced Usage Analysis Processing in MOSS, not the google analytics. I will discuss googles solution in a later post.
Continued…
. Well I have not really touched styling before, so maybe that is why it was so time consuming for me.