SharePoint 2010 will have web analytics

According to a recent blog post from the SharePoint 2010 team, SharePoint 2010 will include a number of built-in analytics that should help companies to better manage and understand traffic across their SharePoint websites. Out of the box reports include:

• Traffic reports that provide information on the number visitors, top referrers, top visitors and other types of data you expect to see in a standard web analytics package.
• Search reports that give you insight into your search traffic on your SharePoint sites.
• Inventory reports, which let you know information about the sites you manage (important information, especially for tasks like eDiscovery).

These reports are aimed at administrators, but you can give end users direct access to this information too, which should save administrators from having to run reports for interested users.

In addition, Microsoft announced that you will be able to generate custom reports and create web analytics workflows. This gives you the ability to do things like send an email to the administrator whenever certain conditions are met.

These reports sound like a big step forward for SharePoint. One of the challenges I've often heard about is tracking the number of sites in a large organization. SharePoint provides a way to create sites easily, but it can also result in orphaned sites which can add up quickly in large companies. These sites can be a nightmare for eDiscovery and legal teams charged with finding all of the content related to a certain incident.

These tools should go a long way toward helping organizations gain some sense of control over their SharePoint implementations.

For more information:
- see the Microsoft blog post

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