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Paul Grenier, Lead Moderator

Stump the Panel » Site Managers and Site Collection Managers

1. 

   ewnash
   Member

   I have a request from the business owner of a site for a detailed report of page hits by user, preferably as a CSV file.

   I can see in many places in the available online resources that I can run detailed usage reports for MOSS sites and filter them by (for example) user. What I can't see is where those reports are run. I'm a site collection admin but I don't have permissions for the SSP, and I believe (our server admin is on holiday so I can't confirm) that advanced usage analysis and logging are enabled. Are these reports available somewhere in the GUI or in Designer that I just haven't noticed, or are they run from the SSP or Central Admin?

   Thanks in advance for any help!

   -Eric

   Posted 7 months ago #
2. 

   AutoSponge
   Administrator

   Eric,

   Detailed Audit logs in MOSS grow like fungus and you need custom jobs to trim or archive them (translation all your RAID arrays are belong to Audit). Does your business owner have a webtrends account or something similar? That's much easier than detailed audit logs.

   Can your owner send out workflow requests every time he wants to make sure someone looked at something?

   Personally, I would push back on this requirement. Other than sounding like an Orwellian "big brother" feature, is the owner really going to sift through these logs? Are they going to then ask for clean-looking reports? Even if you record that someone logged in but did not open a certain document/item doesn't mean that they didn't read it some other way.

   Simple answer: can't be done. Complex answer: it can be done but it's going to cost you (in more ways than one).

   Posted 7 months ago #
3. 

   ewnash
   Member

   Just got back from <whew!> holiday and I have a related question. Turns out that we do have audit logs, so no overcoming the request from the business, and that we also have some custom pruning jobs keeping the logs manageable.

   The problem is this; when I try to open the Content Viewing audit report, instead of opening in Excel (we're still stuck at 2003) I get the XML itself. Lab testing indicates that on a machine with Excel 2007 the report opens correctly. Saving the XML file and then opening with 2003 doesn't seem to resolve the issue, and results in an error where the detail tells me that "XML document must have a top level element".

   Aside from upgrading to Excel 2007 (not an option at this time), any words of wisdom?

   Posted 7 months ago #
4. 

   pagalvin
   Moderator

   You may be able to get an office 2007 excel viewer.

   If that's not available, I think you're stuck, unless you want to parse the XML yourself.

   --Paul Galvin

   Posted 7 months ago #
5. 

   ewnash
   Member

   Thanks Paul; I do have the Excel viewer but some combination of the vagaries of the OS and MOSS prevents it from opening when I try to select one of the audit logs from the UI. Something in the XML header seems to inform the OS that Excel 2007 is the default program for that XML file. I'm not sufficiently expert to parse the XML myself but I have access to resources who can, so I'll work around this.

   The moral of the story; if you MUST provide audit logs, you'll want to have Excel 2007.

   Posted 7 months ago #

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