Monitoring the Site Usage Stats (2007) / Site Web Analytics Reports (2010) should be part of your monthly actions as a Site Owner to track activity on your team site. No matter what you’re putting on your SharePoint sites and how, the bottom line is – are people using it; yes or no. The only way to track that is by monitoring the usage stats every month.
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However, only the Site Owner has rights to view these reports. Why not give your Site Members and Visitors rights to see them too? It could encourage healthy competition for people who want to be at the top of the list, especially to the Top Visitors section. You could run competitions that give recognition of some sort to the person who is top of the list three months in a row for example. It will also bring awareness to the team of what pages are used the most so they can maintain them better.
To grant Members or Visitors access to these reports, you need to change the Permission Levels. You need to be a Site Owner to do this. Make sure you have some understanding of SharePoint permissions before you play in this space! If you don’t know how to get to this screen, then you should not be playing with permissions.
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Add the View Usage item permission level to the Read and Contribute permission levels.
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Insert the link to the usage / analytics to a funky image on your landing page and you’re good to go. Anyone who clicks on the usage stats link on your landing page will be able to see the activity.
In SharePoint 2007 you need to add a reminder for yourself in Outlook to extract the reports on the last day of every month. Take a screen dump and drop them into a Word or PowerPoint doc and date them. In SharePoint 2010 you can automate that and schedule them to be emailed to you.
Tracking progress will allow to monitor if you’re on the right track. It’s also good for any performance reporting you may be subject to. Get stats from the first day you launch your team site, then monitor it monthly. You will pick up great trends, show how you’ve progressed and allow you to adapt your site to do more of what works. If you get a sudden spike in usage, go check back in your Outlook calendar to see if anything special happened that week. If there was, do more of that because it motivated people to come to your site.
As a result, you will be able to motivate your progress on SharePoint by saying in the first month you had X percentage usage and adoption, but after 6 months it’s grown by X percent. It’s good for those increase letters! 😉
Views from Veronique 