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!

SharePoint 2013 Quick Actions

One trick for working with your users is to put the tasks they need to complete right in front of them. The easier you can make things work for them, the better things will be for the adoption of the solution. Using SharePoint Designer 2013 you can easily help users by creating Quick Actions for them. These are basically shortcuts that allow them to quickly kick off a workflow or navigate to a specific page. Below is an example of a Quick Action that was added to the display view of an item:

Quick Actions

There are three actions that you can create within a quick action, including:

• Navigate to a Form (example:DispForm.aspx)
• Initiate a Workflow
• Navigate to a URL

These are the common actions that you can use for a quick action, but there are various locations where the Quick Action would appear.

Location	Description
List Item Menu	This would be displayed on the list drop down item (when you select the item (…) ellipse )
Display Form Ribbon	This would be displayed when you select the view properties page for the item.
Edit Form Ribbon	This would be displayed when you select the edit properties page for the item.
New Form Ribbon	This would be displayed when you select the New Item page.
View Ribbon	This would be displayed on the Items ribbon of the list view. This would allow you to click the check mark next to an item in the full list (tabular view) and then select the quick action from the Ribbon.

Image & Rights Masking

When you create a quick action you can assign an Image to the Quick Action that will be displayed (provided the Master Page isn't hiding it). You are allowed to upload a 32 x 32 or 16 x 16 image. The best way to do this is to upload the image to one of the site libraries and then just link to it. It is very important that you use an image with the exact measurements as any other size image will not load.

Rights masking is a way that you can display the action to only users that have the same role as the one you list. This is a way that you can hide the actions from people who can just read the site while still showing custom actions to the site administrators. For a list of all available masks you can check out this article from TechNet -http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spbasepermissions.aspx

Examples & Ideas

This approach can really help you add something a little extra to your solution to help your users make the most of it! Here are some ideas for ways that you could utilize this approach:

• Provide a Link to a Page with Additional Detail on the View Item. This would allow users to select a button from the Ribbon if they needed additional information (and would help keep the display page cleaner).
• Provide a link to the most common workflows that users would need to start.
• Provide a link for workflows that only the admins could see. This would make things easier for them while at the same time not showing additional buttons for all the users.

SharePoint 2013: A Quick Overview of Workflow

This is one of those topics that I feel gets overlooked a lot as we move forward with additional releases of SharePoint. If you happen to have been using SharePoint for years you probably have a good idea of the workflows available and what you can do with them, but if you are just getting started (like so many I talk to are) then it can be often times overwhelming. In this post I am going to provide a very high level overview of the workflows available how they all work together.

What is a Workflow?

The first thing is an understanding of what a workflow is and how it works within SharePoint. In the most basic terms in SharePoint a workflow is a way to route content to a library or a list, collect data from a user, create tasks for a user or to send notification to users. The workflows come in two flavors – configurable or custom. There are currently two different workflow engines available and visible within SharePoint – the SharePoint 2010 workflows and the SharePoint 2013 workflows. These are two different types of workflows with two different sets of actions and functionality. This means that there are some things you can do in one version of the workflow that you simply cannot do in the other. This is honestly where some of the confusion comes from in my opinion. The reason that both exist today is to help ensure that workflows you built in SharePoint 2010 are still compatible in SharePoint 2013.

There are several different kinds of workflow that you can create –

• List Workflow: These are associated with a single list and are started for each item in the list.
• Site Workflows: These are workflows that are not based on a specific list and can be found in Site Actions. An example of these would be "sending a weekly email reminder".
• Reusable Workflows: These are workflows that are associated with a content type (think "Project Charter" or "Sales Report") and can be configured to run on any content that is of that same content type.

In my experience, most workflows that the typical business power user creates are the List Workflows and are based on a specific process that can be clearly identified.

Configurable or Custom?

The next area that seems to cause some confusion is around the area of adding a workflow to a list or creating a custom workflow. In SharePoint 2010 workflows there are a collection of workflows that exists as templates that can be configured for lists. These workflows are common activities such as document approval or collecting comments. In 2013, these configurable workflows don't exist so all of the workflows you build are custom workflows that you can build within SharePoint Designer. If you want to add one of these configurable workflows to your list you can do so through the Workflow settings option (ensure the workflows feature is activated).

2010 Workflows on a 2013 Site?

Yes, this is completely possible. In fact in many cases I have seen users purposely create a 2010 workflow because they are wanting to use a set a features that was only available within 2010 and not available at all in 2013. Whenever you create a new workflow in SharePoint 2013 you will be given the opportunity to select if you would like to build the workflow using the 2010 or the 2013 foundation.

Hopefully this very quick, high level post helps shed some light on the concept of workflows and helps you see the available options for out of the box workflows.

SharePoint 2013: Create a Weekly Reminder Workflow

One of the most common requests I get from users is the ability to create a weekly reminder notification that will remind users to complete an action. Using the SharePoint 2013 workflows this is a pretty easy requirement to meet since we now have access to looping.

To get started you will need to create a site workflow. For my example I am creating an initiation variable that allows the user to set an end date when they start the workflow. The workflow will send an email, pause for 7 days and then loop again. The first check in the loop is to determine if the date is less than the end date. By doing this we are able to set a reoccurring workflow that will repeatedly remind users of items.

Here are some screenshots to get you started.

Create a Site Workflow in SharePoint Designer

  Create an Initiation Variable so the person who starts the workflow can select an end date.

Add the Workflow Actions (including the loop)

 

Our workflow first sets a variable (type date) to the current date. It then enters the loop and tests to see if the variable Today is less than the End Date (variable entered by workflow starter). If the condition is true it will send an email and then add 7 days to the variable and wait until the 7 days are up and then start the loop again.

 The email is a pretty basic email and a screenshot of the design of it is included below.

 

 Start the Workflow (from Site Contents)

 

 

Enter in the date that you would like the reminders to stop being sent.

 

 Once this has been started, the users you selected in your workflow will get an email notification (as you configured in your workflow). 

Additional Ideas

This post has an example of how you could send out a weekly reminder via email to a team, but there are multiple uses for this concept. Another common example would be if you wanted to create new tasks every week. So an example would be "we have a weekly set of tasks that need to be completed" – your workflow could create and assign those new tasks every week. Reminders are a huge part of our daily tasks and using these simple workflow techniques will help you really make the most of your business solutions!