SharePoint 2010: Scheduling Reports and Alerts for Web Analytics

Web Analytics is one of those hidden gems included in SharePoint 2010 that I don't think many people are taking advantage of. We spend a lot of time building solutions, but if we don't maintain them and really understand how they are being used then we are missing out on a lot of great information. In SharePoint 2010 we have some great features that make this monitoring process easy. Huge improvements have been made since 2007, but I think many people don't realize the impact. In the rest of this blog we are going to look at the new features that allow us to configure alerts and reports via a site workflow. By taking advantage of these features we can be automatically notified when our sites meet certain criteria. Using these reports we can become very proactive in the management of our solutions.

SharePoint On-Premise Only

The first thing that we want to note about this is that these features are not available in the Office 365 offering. Hopefully, over time as the offering matures we will be given access to these features, but as of the current release these features are not available.

Site Web vs Site Collection

The next thing we want to note is that there are two types of reports we can look at, the Web (subsite) or the Site Collection. When we look at the site collection we will get additional information such as search statistics. When you generate reports and alerts you will need to select the scope to be either the current site you are working on or the site collection.

Here is a screenshots of the Site Collection summary page:

There are a few things to notice on this page:

1. You can use the option in the Ribbon to modify the date range.
2. You can see the previous value as well as the trend over time.

Notice that whenever you choose to change the settings that you also have an option to Schedule Alerts or Reports. When you click this option you are taken to a page that you can use to configure a site workflow. You have two options available:

1. Reports- this will email you an excel file with a status report on the items you select.
2. Alerts- this will email you an alert when a certain condition has been fulfilled (ie- page views greater than 5,000)

Below is a screenshot for configuring an alert:

And now, here is a screenshot of the alert that is generated. The condition for mine was if the page views are greater than zero, send me an alert.

Below is a screenshot for configuring a scheduled report:

And here is the email that is generated for the reports. Notice that if no data is included for the report that a note is added to the message.

Here is one of the reports that are attached with the email:

So as you can see we have two ways that we can configure our site collections to notify us about usage. It is very likely that we don't have the bandwidth to go in and review each of our solutions usage statistics, but with these reports we can have them configured to notify us when we need to take action. If you aren't using these features yet, I highly recommend them!