Tuesday, November 02, 2010

SharePoint 2007 Usage Reports

For the past few weeks I was trying to develop some custom reports to track SharePoint site usage. The built-in reports show only the current statistics. But if someone wants to view old statistics there is no way that person can generate a report.
I started by going through the MOSS object model to find out some method where I can generate these reports easily. Then I found SPWeb.GetUsageData method. But it was giving enough problems and I decided to look for some other mean.
Finally I end up with a happy solution. It was so easy, you just connect to SharePoint shared services database and it has all the tables and views you need to generate the reports.



SharePoint Shared Services database



Available views



All the tables starting with ‘ANL’ contains site usage data.

I simply wrote few queries and developed required reports using SSRS. Or even you can use any reporting tool which is available in the market. Since I used SSRS I simply published it into a SharePoint site.
Following is a sample query I wrote to view the most popular documents in a SharePoint site.

SELECT ANLResource.DocName, COUNT_BIG(*) AS HitCount
FROM ANLResourceHits INNER JOIN
ANLWeb ON ANLResourceHits.WebGuid = ANLWeb.WebGuid INNER JOIN
ANLResource ON ANLResourceHits.ResourceId = ANLResource.ResourceId
WHERE (CHARINDEX(‘.aspx’, ANLResource.DocName) = 0) AND (CHARINDEX(‘.swf’,
ANLResource.DocName) = 0)
GROUP BY ANLResource.DocName
ORDER BY HitCount DESC

article from Kolitha de Silva's blog!

Monday, November 01, 2010

Installing SharePoint Designer 2007 and 2010

Nope, SharePoint designer 2010 is not supporting backward compatibility. It won't support Windows SharePoint Services v3 or earlier versions. The answer is... yes, SharePoint designer 2010 only works for SharePoint 2010. I think this news is hard for all of us, but this will bring some good times as well.

Because in this way, MS will build very good version of product without carrying any historical "sins" along. By taking this as the advantage they will only concentrate on the SharePoint 2010 support and will make really a very good product. So, how to get the support for SharePoint 2007 sites? Is there no other way to edit the earlier version sites? I know this is the question in your mind now.
 
Don't fear. There is an option. By thinking these questions in mind, the SharePoint designer team is developing the software/product to install the designer side by side. So, you can install the SharePoint designer side by side the both versions on the same machine without having any issues. So, this will solve all the problems. If any site which is of earlier than SharePoint 2010 you can use SharePoint Designer 2007, for SharePoint 2010 you can use SharePoint designer 2010.

Are there any requirements for side by side installation? Yes, it has some requirements. You know a big change from previous version to current version is bit [32 bit vs 64 bit]. As SharePoint Designer 2007 is came only on 32-bit[x86], you will only install SharePoint Designer 2010[X86] 32 bit version side by side on a server. And if you install SharePoint Designer 64-bit on a server which has installed 32-bit MS Office, then it won’t give good result. More about 32bit vs 64bit architecture decisions in office 2010 can be read at http://blogs.technet.com/b/office2010/archive/2010/02/23/understanding-64-bit-office.aspx.

So, pay attention whilst installing the SPD and install everything of same version only.