One of the most talked about capabilities since the launch of SharePoint 2010 is the Managed Metadata Service.  For those of you who aren’t already familiar with this service and the support it provides for modeling and deploying a rich corporate taxonomy, I’d recommend reading Pat’s post Introducing Enterprise Metadata Management.  For those of you who are familiar with the great taxonomy capabilities in SharePoint 2010, I’m sure many of you have spent time looking at an empty term store wondering where to start.  If you’re lucky, you already have a well defined corporate taxonomy and should by now have leveraged our import capabilities to pre load SharePoint with the vocabulary you want your users to leverage for tagging and finding content.  On the other hand, you could be like many customers I talk to who don’t even know where to start when it comes to developing a taxonomy, or have spent years in conference rooms debating what the right taxonomy should be.  You’ve probably even head someone say “I’m sure someone has already solved this problem”, and if that’s the case, that someone was the smartest person in the room for two key reasons.  The first is that there are professional taxonomists who have already modeled most business domains and the second is that the people responsible for creating content in your company have already developed a community vocabulary or folksonomy that they use extensively.

If you happen to be one of those customers who is stuck looking at an empty term store then I’ve got great news for you.  The SharePoint team have teamed up with WAND, a leading provider of Enterprise Taxonomies, to make their General Business Taxonomy available as a freely available download.  The General Business Taxonomy consists of around 500 terms describing common functional areas that exist in most businesses.  The General Business Taxonomy can be imported in to the SharePoint 2010 term store within minutes and provides a great starting point for customers looking to build a corporate vocabulary and take advantage of the Managed Metadata Service.  In addition to this freely available download, WAND provide a range of taxonomies covering a variety of domains including Products and Services, Local Search, Enterprise, Jobs, Travel, Medical, Lifecycle, Finance and Records Retention.

Download the General Business Taxonomy today and start to explore the benefits that taxonomy can bring to your business and your people. 

If you’re new to taxonomy and the benefits it can brings to your business, take a look at the following sites:

• TechNet – Managed Metadata and Taxonomy Resource Center
• Dan Kogan (Senior Lead Program Manager) – SharePoint 2010 Metadata Webinar
• WAND – Taxonomy 101
• WAND Blog

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corporation

I’m pleased to announce that we have Released to Web, the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Connector for SharePoint.  The CMIS Connector for SharePoint ships as part of the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit, providing a CMIS interface over the top of SharePoint as well as a CMIS Consumer Web Part that can be used to display content from other CMIS enabled repositories.

You can download the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit today and start to take advantage of this new set of capabilities within SharePoint Server 2010 by building your own Composite Content Applications that talk to SharePoint through CMIS or configuring SharePoint to interoperate with other ECM repositories through the CMIS Consumer Web Part.

Microsoft has been involved in defining the CMIS specification since the beginning and has invested significant resources to ensure that our customers are able to take advantage of support for CMIS in SharePoint 2010 just months after releasing the latest version of our platform.  We are excited about the opportunities that the CMIS standard will open up within the industry and look forward to seeing more ECM vendors deliver support for CMIS in their upcoming product releases.

For further reading on CMIS, visit these sites:

• Details of the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit on TechNet
• Original announcement of the CMIS specification and Microsoft’s involvement
• OASIS Members Approve Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Specification
• OASIS CMIS Technical Committee

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corporation

My colleagues in the Exchange team have introduced a wealth of new capabilities in Exchange 2010 to support email archiving, retention and discovery but I’m often asked how an organization should think about managing emails in SharePoint as part of an overall collaboration and content management strategy.  While there are no hard and fast rules, it pays to think about four distinct scenarios:

1. Personal email management
2. Project and case management
3. Email archiving
4. Records management

Each of these scenarios has a set of desired outcomes and set of capabilities that best meet those outcomes so let’s take each one in turn.

Personal email management

Personal email management is all about empowering end users to take control of their inbox, making it easier to organize, find and take action on email.  Users want a mail client that makes it easy to manage email on a day to day basis and expect their IT department to take care of backup and restore.

Project and case management

Project and case management is all about sharing information and managing a group of related artifacts in a single location with a common security model, metadata model and information management policy.  Users are looking for a solution that makes it easy to collaborate and find information while leveraging workflow to drive common business processes.

Email archiving

Email archiving is all about taking control of the proliferation of email within an organization, driving down the cost of provisioning ever increasing inbox requirements and applying broad brush time based disposition.  Email archiving is typically driven by IT who implement rules and retention policy that is typically transparent to end users.

Records management

Records management is all about identifying business critical content, driving appropriate classification and then applying relevant retention management policies.  Accurate classification of content and applying appropriate metadata ensures that information is easy to find and use throughout the enterprise.  At the same time, appropriate use of retention policies ensure that businesses can gracefully age content that is no longer of value while adhering to relevant government and industry regulations.  Email is a critical part of any modern records management strategy and so businesses need to make it easy for end users to identify and classify email that is considered to be business critical content.

Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 provide great capabilities to deal with personal email management and email archiving while SharePoint 2010 provides an ideal platform for storing email that is part of project and case management or an effective and encompassing records management strategy.

Of course there is a natural flow or continuum as email may start by being well managed in a user’s inbox, it may have an email archiving policy attached to it but a user may decide to manage it as part of a project and then finally declare the email as a record upon project completion.  As I said at the start, there are no hard and fast rules but hopefully I’ve given you a better frame of reference for working out what systems are required to support email from creation to disposition depending on the required business outcomes.

If you want to hear more about this topic, I’ll be presenting a webinar with Colligo, one of our partners who provide an add-in for Outlook that makes it easy for users to drag and drop email in to SharePoint, applying the appropriate Content Type and metadata attributes as part of the process.  The webinar is on June 17th so sign up now.

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager – ECM and Compliance
Microsoft Corporation

As part of SharePoint 2010, we have created a set of features to help you collect, report, and analyze the usage and effectiveness of your SharePoint 2010 deployment.  These set of features are a part of the Web Analytics capabilities of SharePoint 2010. The overview of the Web Analytics features in SharePoint 2010 was presented in this blog post.

This blog post delves deeper into the various metrics available to analyze the site usage data. There are three categories of the SharePoint Web Analytics reports: Traffic, Search, and Inventory. The reports are aggregated for various SharePoint entities like Site, Site Collection, and Web Application for each farm. Further, reports are also aggregated per search service application. By default, the reports show the data for a period of 30 days. One can change the time period to view data for up to 25 months by going to ‘Analyze’ tab.

Visually we show the metrics in one of the two ways: trend reports and rank reports. A trend report shows how a particular metric is doing over a period of time. While a rank report, shows the top 2000 results for a particular metric. Figure 1, 2 show examples of a trend and rank report respectively. That’s not all; you can further analyze the reports by applying filters like string match in the URL, user name, queries, browser and others.

Figure 1:  Example of a Trend Report showing Number of Page Views for each day for a default period of 30 days.

Figure 2:  Example of a Rank Report showing the Top Pages sorted on the Number of Page Views for a default period of 30 days.

What follows is an overview of each type of the report and the associated metrics. Also, summarized are the kind of reports available for each level of aggregation i.e. Site, Site Collection and Web Application and Search Service Application.

Traffic Reports

The traffic reports capture the user behavior information related to total clicks, frequent users, popular pages, and information about navigation to and from the current SharePoint component.

Trend Reports

1. Number of Page Views: Total number of page views each day.
2. Number of Daily Unique Visitors: Total number of unique visitors each day. SharePoint authenticated users and anonymous users (using IP address) are counted as visitors.
3. Number of Referrers: Total number of unique URL’s external to the current entity (parent entity is treated as external as well), from where the users navigated to the current entity.

Rank Reports

1. Top Pages: Most viewed pages in the current entity.
2. Top Visitors: Most frequent visitors of the current entity.
3. Top Referrers: Top URL’s external to the current entity from where users navigated to the current entity.
4. Top Destinations: Similar to Referrers, these are the top external URL’s that the user visited from the current entity.
5. Top Browsers: Top browsers being used to visit the current entity.

Table 1:  Summary of the traffic reports availability at different SharePoint hierarchy levels

Note: Traffic Reports do not apply at Search Service Application level.

Search Reports

The search reports capture the user behavior information related to the queries on the site.

Trend Reports

1. Number of Queries: Total number of queries each day.

Rank Reports

1. Top Queries: Most issued queries per day.
2. Failed Queries: Most issued queries for which either there were no results or the user did not click on any results.
3. No Result Queries: Most issued queries for which no results were returned.

Other Reports

1. Best Bet Suggestion Report: Recommends URLs as most likely results for particular search queries based on analysis of usage patterns. The site administrators can accept or reject these suggestions. If they accept, the corresponding query-URL pair is added to the search keywords list.
2. Best Bet Usage: Shows how Best Bet suggestions are doing over time. For every Best Bet query issued, the report shows the percentage of clicks on the Best Bet URL compared to other URLs.
3. Best Bet Action History Report: Tracks the actions performed by the site administrator on the ‘Best Bet Suggestion’ Report.

Table 2:  Summary of the search reports availability at different SharePoint component hierarchy levels

Note: The search reports do not apply at Site Level.

Inventory Reports

The inventory reports are targeted to help the site administrators in managing the site by keeping track of the site structure and storage and version issues.

Trend Reports

1. Number of Site Collections: Total number of site collections for each Web Service Application for each day.
2. Storage Usage: Total storage used in Megabyte (MB) for a site collection and the ‘Maximum Storage Allowed’ in MB for each day.
3. Number of Sites: Total number of sites within each Site Collection for each day.

Rank Reports

1. Top Site Product Versions: The ‘Site Product Version’ sorted in the order of ‘Number of Sites’ or ‘Percentage of Overall’ sites using the corresponding version for this site collection.
2. Top Site Languages: The ‘Site Product Language’ sorted in the order of ‘Number of Sites’ or ‘Percentage of Overall’ sites using that language for this site collection.

Table 3:  Summary of Inventory Reports availability at different SharePoint component hierarchy levels

Note: Traffic Reports do not apply at Search Service Application level.

Look out for more to come

Keep an eye out for more blogs on customizing the reports using Excel, using workflow feature to scheduled reports and alerts and adding the ‘What’s Popular’ Web Part to your pages.