Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2007

18.1. Reporting

A key part of administering a web site is monitoring usage, traffic, performance, and so on. SharePoint Designer offers a number of built-in reports to help site owners optimize their sites. In addition, SharePoint itself provides some web-based summaries. Finally, raw log information is available for you to analyze, using tools of your choice.

A Few Words about Web Reporting Since the dawn of the Internet and the World Wide Web, site owners have been trying to improve their sites by monitoring site usage. Many usage analysis tools have been developed over the years. It is now fairly easy to get a good idea of what is popular and what is not. What gives people trouble is trying to measure things like visits to their sites. While it is easy to determine how many times a server has sent a particular file to a particular web address, it is much harder to determine whether a user has come to a site for many short visits or a few longer ones. In addition, proxies and other forms of caching can reduce the number of times a server sends a file, compared to the number of times someone has seen it. Different reporting tools use different strategies for dealing with this imprecision, which can result in slightly different actual numbers being reported for the same kinds of activities. Choosing slightly different start and end times for reporting periods can also result in discrepancies between tools, even of absolute numbers. This does not make one tool right or another ...