Microsoft Office

If you blog on a SharePoint site like we do, chances are you want to know how many people visit your site, how they find it, and other information about your readership. Unfortunately, the native SharePoint usage reports are not much help for the kind of information you want to see.

However, there are a couple free Web analytics programs that are easy to hook up and use. One of the newest is Microsoft adCenter Analytics. Because the site says it’s a limited Beta, you have to register and then wait for an invitation to join the program. It typically takes a few days to hear back from them, but when you receive your invitation you can follow their simple instructions to create a profile and add the script to your site.

The thing is, their instructions don’t address what to do on a SharePoint site. So that’s where we come in. I’ve seen a few blog posts and videos out there about how to add other analytics scripts to a SharePoint blog, but they all seem either light on detail or leave out a key piece of information, so I shot my own video, Add Microsoft adCenter analytics to your SharePoint blog home page.

As the title suggests, I show only how to add the script to your home page. This will capture lots of great numbers about home page usage, but does not capture information about individual posts.

Microsoft adCenter Analytics

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From the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Blog: So here it goes…. I’ll summarize four very different SharePoint offerings, some of them you probably weren’t even aware were based on SharePoint. Just for fun, I’ll call them Mini, Small, Medium, and Large-SharePoint.

Mini-SharePoint

Office Live Workspace, believe it or not, is built on SharePoint but highly customized and simplified for the end user. The idea is simple – create a workspace (which is like a folder), add files to it, then share it with others. Create and share Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, pictures, notes, and custom lists with anyone you want. Or use it to share files between work and home, which is a lot easier than emailing files back and forth.

I’ve created one workspace to share files with colleagues, another workspace to share photos with family, and a third workspace to organize forms and schedules for my vanpool.

Find out more at http://workspace.officelive.com

Small-SharePoint

Office Live Small Business is also built on SharePoint but highly customized with Web features, Web applications, and Web site tools. It includes a Web site, multiple email accounts, and Web applications ideal for the small business with up to 10 employees. The Web site features allow you to create a site without knowing a thing about HTML, Web design, or Web creation software. Use the included Web applications to manage and communicate with employees and customers. For simple file sharing, use the Office Live Workspace included with your account.

My goal this year is to move my mom’s real estate practice to the Web using this service.

Find out more at http://smallbusiness.officelive.com

Medium-SharePoint

SharePoint Online, along with Exchange Online, Communications Online, and Live Meeting make up the new Microsoft Online Services. Rather than installing and maintaining SharePoint Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and other server software in your office, just sign up for this business hosting solution and let Microsoft do the heavy IT lifting for you. The service can handle up to 500 individual PC users. Just launch a Web browser, and you have immediate access to your entire business environment.

I would highly recommend this service to any small business that has outgrown Office Live Small Business but is too small to manage a SharePoint deployment.

Find out more at http://www.microsoft.com/online

Large-SharePoint

SharePoint Server (Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server). Last but not least, we have the actual SharePoint software in the box. For the large and enterprise organizations looking to deploy a completely customized and integrated content management solution across the organization, this is what you need. With SharePoint running on your corporate servers, you have complete control over your corporate Intranet, Extranet, and Internet presence, and you can build on the existing collaboration tools, managed business processes, and integration with Microsoft Office client applications.

This is what I use at work every day to communicate with colleagues, collaborate on projects, find critical business data, and actively monitor projects in my department and other departments.

Find out more at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

I hope this clarifies the various SharePoint offerings that you or your business can choose from.

Today’s author, Diego Oppenheimer, a Program Manager on the Excel team, talks about connecting PivotTables to data stored in SharePoint Lists:

Many of us on the Excel team have been approached by customers asking us how to create a connection to a SharePoint list. SharePoint lists can be exported easily by creating a Microsoft Office Excel Web Query. The connection can then be tied directly to lists or PivotTables in the workbook like any other Data Connection.

I have a SharePoint List that we use to upload and keep track of all project management reports. The list contains information like the project manager that uploaded it, the date, and the name of the reports as well as other automated fields created by SharePoint to make my life easier. Using the filters provided by SharePoint gives me a great way navigate my list quickly and easily but I am more interested in creating a macro view of the team reports so an easy solution would be to connect my SharePoint List to a PivotTable. The fact that my SharePoint List has more than 250 rows makes the use of a PivotTable even more appealing.

Creating the Connection and the PivotTable:

Once we have located the SharePoint list we want to export we go to “Export to Spreadsheet” in the “Actions” menu button.

When the message prompting us if we would like to open or save the Microsoft Office Excel Web Query click “Open” (or you can save for use later). If you haven’t started Excel yet this should start it up.

Click “Enable” to unblock the data connection.

If you had Excel already open you will get the the “Import Data” menu. In the case that you did not have Excel open already opening the connection will create a a resfreshable query table in the workbook.

From this menu we can choose to directly create a “PivotTable Report” a report and a “PivotChart” or just a query “Table”. Today I am interested in creating a PivotTable so I select “PivotTable Report” and hit “Ok”.

Now I can see all my uploaded reports in the PivotTable. To get a better view of what is going on we add the Project Manager field to Rows, Date to the Report Filter (so we can filter by date) and the Name field (the name of each one of our uploaded reports on the SharePoint List) to Values. By adding Name to Values we are essentially creating a count of how many name items we have in the data source.

We replace “Count of Name” with “# Reports” by editing in the formula tab like any other cell.

Now I can easily view the numbers of reports per project manager and filter by date as well as viewing the “Grand Total” number of reports. This is great but the team actually splits up in sub teams by area of expertise so I am going to group them to make this clearer.

We select all the members of the each team in the PivotTable and right click. Select “Group”. Now I can rename the Group label to better represent the teams. I name my groups “Finance”. “Technology” & “Operations”.

Combining the use of our Date filter and the groups we created we can easily see a macro view of all the project management reports.

As soon as new reports are populated into my SharePoint List I will be able to update the PivotTable (right click on the PivotTable then click “Refresh”).

Where does the connection live?

Like all other data connections in our work book we can access it by selecting the “Existing Connections” button under the “Data” tab.

We can see that our SharePoint List connection is shown under “Connections in this Workbook” and can now be used to create new PivotTables.

Multiple Microsoft Office Excel Web Queries can be used to monitor more than one SharePoint list at a time as well as to easily analyze the data in them using PivotTables and PivotCharts. The same as with all Office Data Connections you can now use this connection with multiple workbooks and update any connection changes in a single place.

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides the powerful tools you need to deliver compelling and attractive SharePoint sites and quickly build workflow-enabled applications and reporting tools on the SharePoint platform, all in an IT-managed environment.

1. Be more productive with next-generation Microsoft Web technologies.
Enjoy a new level of support for creating and customizing next-generation SharePoint Web sites and technologies. Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has deep editing support for the technologies underlying Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology, such as ASP.NET 2.0, cascading style sheets, and Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation.

2. Customize SharePoint sites exactly the way you want.
Choose the format and content of your SharePoint pages with Office SharePoint Designer 2007 — the customization tool for the entire SharePoint family. You can tailor SharePoint sites to your needs and set brand requirements using the latest ASP.NET technology, established Web standards such as XHTML, and cascading style sheets.

3. Easily make or undo changes across entire SharePoint sites.
Make format and layout changes to entire SharePoint sites simply by editing the master page and modifying the SharePoint cascading style sheets. Undo changes to the home page using the Revert to Site Template Page command in Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

4. Maintain control over site customization.
Site administrators and IT managers can control exactly how Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is used to help ensure information workers have an IT-managed and -compliant experience. Set up Contributor Settings for each role defined in the SharePoint site, and control access to specific actions.

5. Create workflows to automate business processes.
Automate business processes associated with SharePoint lists and document libraries using the Workflow Designer, a powerful and easy-to-use tool that comes with Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Set up custom workflow conditions and actions, link them to your SharePoint data, and deploy them with a single click, without installing server code.

6. Create interactive Web pages without writing code.
Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has a full set of tools to help you integrate data into SharePoint pages and present that data using XSLT in SharePoint sites. You can access tools for using XSLT Data Views, List View Web Parts, Web Part connections, ASP.NET controls, and workflow.

7. Integrate business data.
Create views and forms for working with a variety of data sources using tools supported by Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Build SharePoint Web pages that present and edit data coming from SharePoint lists and document libraries, XML files, Microsoft SQL Server databases, Web services, and enterprise systems.

8. Develop sites compatible with a wide range of browsers and Web standards.
Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has excellent support for creating Web pages based on Web standards such as XHTML and cascading style sheets and meeting Web accessibility requirements for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG and Section 508 (29 U.S.C. 794d), including built-in compatibility checkers for these standards.

9. Build advanced ASP.NET pages.
Office SharePoint Designer 2007 supports creating and editing ASP.NET pages. It provides the same level of support as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 for ASP.NET control hosting, property editing, toolbox, and Microsoft IntelliSense technology in Code View.

10. Manage and help protect your site.
Use reports in Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to help manage your site by checking for broken links, unused pages, cascading style sheets usage, and master page usage. Site backup and restore features make it easy to save your site to a single file for helping to protect data or moving it to another server running Windows SharePoint Services technology.