Have you activated the audit settings on your site collection?
If there is a leak of critical company information resulting in losing a merger deal, and the Chairman of the Board wants to know who read or downloaded the strategic document from SharePoint; what are you going to say? Sorry, we didn’t activate the audit settings because it makes too many log files and we don’t have the space to store them? What do you think the Chairman will say to that?
Don’t wait until there is a major incident before catering for this. Audit settings must be manually activated on a site collection level to track activity in that site collection.
IT usually discourages the activation of these settings due to the large log files it can result in. However, this should have been part of the SharePoint server architecture planning in the first place. It is a valid business requirement to be able to track activity of company content and users.
Be selective on what you activate on which site collection. You don’t need the settings on at all if it’s just a playpen / sandbox type collection; but on executive level site collections, it may be critical. Add rules around the use of the audit settings to your end user governance plan.
You need to be a Site Collection Administrator to see these settings.
Views from Veronique 
Yes absolutely. But it’s seldom that companies do any of that.
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If your business uses SharePoint you might as well use it to its fullest potential. I agree that there needs to be architecture planning involved so that you can use all of the features that are available and beneficial to your business.
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Most of the stuff I’ve read on that setting says to leave it alone, so that’s why I left it out. 🙂
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Hi Veronique, I always set the location for the file. You left it open in the example. Is there a reason for not triiming and not mentioning the file?
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I totally agree babe.
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This is so important, I have set mine up on most of my sites. The guilty party tries to argue but the report is black & white. It is one of the most important activations I think.
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[…] Have you activated the audit settings on your site collection? If there is a leak of critical company information resulting in losing a merger deal, and the Chairman of the Board wants to know who read or downloaded the strategic … Continue reading → Read More… […]
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