Sharepoint and Webtrends Analytics Ideas

 

Sharepoint 2010 has some great new features.  Especially considering some of the disturbing necessities of previous Sharepoint Versions.

The first thing I noticed was that Visual Studio 2010 has default templates for building Sharepoint Projects.  This is huge compared to the monstrous and annoying effort required for development on previous versions.

Being able to build Sharepoint Projects from Visual Studio 2010 is a huge change, enabling IT & Development Groups to actually use regular Windows 7 Machines instead of needing Windows Server operating systems and licenses to build Sharepoint Applications.  To me, this was always a non-starter, and actively discouraged Sharepoint Applications in the past ? obviously most companies had not listened to the voice of reason.  But now, I have changed to actively encouraging Sharepoint 2010 Projects now.

 

The second thing is, it is more open and easier to build public facing sites finally.  This has been desperately needed.  I am glad that it has finally become a higher priority.  Not that I totally trust the Sharepoint 2010 Server to be fully web compliant, I have seen that they’ve taken leaps ahead.

The other thing I stumbled upon recently that I had not seen was the analytics capabilities of Sharepoint 2010.  The overview is that you can get traffic, search, and inventory reports based on how much traffic the site gets, who visits the sites, and other web analytics data.  Definitely check out the blog entry "Introducing Web Analytics in Sharepoint 2010" on the Enterprise Content Management (WCM) Blog.

Between the Sharepoint Analytics, Silverlight, and offerings we provide at Webtrends we now have direct extensibility points form the internal Sharepoint Data Sources, Analytics Data Stores, temp caching and other control mechanisms within Silverlight, and much more.  What does all that techno-babble mean?  It means more data, more available faster, easier access, decreased development times, more accurate reporting, more timely reporting, and the list goes on.  Pretty much ever metric about web analytics within Sharepoint 2010 has just gotten better.

The other architectural pieces I noticed is the Sharepoint Aggregation of data is now per web application in the farm, per site collection, per site, and per search service application.  This can be broken out even further with On Demand Webtrends Analytics by providing ETL between the Sharepoint and pulling the Sharepoint or extended analytics data Webtrends provides into the Business Intelligence (BI) framework within an enterprise.  At this point I can only imagine the scale and available data points for managing enterprise collaboration, social media, and other capabilities with this combination.  I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of ROI we can see from these integrations, whatever it is, I already know it will be measurable and I suspect substantial.

For more information about Sharepoint 2010 check out the Sharepoint Blog and for more information regarding how Webtrends can get your Sharepoint Site Analytics extended check out Webtrends Professional Services!

Are there any data points, questions, thoughts, or ideas you have about connecting Sharepoint & Analytics Data?  Anything you haven’t seen connected that should be?  Does your organization use Sharepoint, Webtrends Analytics, or other collaboration software?  Anyway, I am no shill, I am honestly interested in these connections outside of the fact I work for Webtrends.  If you have a minute, please let me know what your thoughts are on these technology connections.