View Changes is a new SharePoint 2010 Variations feature that compares two versions of a source page relevant to the corresponding target page. View Changes provides a report highlighting the differences between the source version that has most recently propagated to the target and the prior source version that propagated to the target and was published on the target. By highlighting differences, the View Changes button simplifies in-browser content editing using the Variations feature.

I’m Josh Stickler, the Program Manager responsible for Variations. In this post, I will explain:

• Where to find the View Changes button
• When the View Changes button is available
• Our envisioned content editing process using View Changes

The most common application of the Variations feature is in multi-language sites.  Let’s look at View Changes from the perspective of Anders, an English-to-Danish translator working with the Danish subsidiary of AdventureWorks, an international camping goods retailer.

AdventureWorks is set up with an English (EN-US) site as its source label and target labels for international markets, each corresponding to a different language.  Pages from the source label automatically propagate to the target labels when they are published so AdventureWorks’ global web presence is in sync.  Translators at each of the targets then process the English-language content for localized consumption. AdventureWorks’ Variations hierarchy looks like this:

Initial Localization

Automatic Creation

Let’s imagine that content authors at AdventureWorks in the United States have just published a new page with a sneak peek of this winter’s new product lineup. Since “Automatic Creation” is enabled (this is the case by default), the page is picked up by the Variations Propagate Pages timer job and copied to all target labels, including Danish (DA-DK).

E-mail Notification

As the designated owner of the new page, Anders gets an e-mail informing him that this page has been copied to the target label by the Variations feature and is ready for processing. 

Target Translation and Publication

Anders navigates to the page on the Danish (DA-DK) variation of the AdventureWorks website and sees the English language content.  Since it’s all new, he translates all of this content into Danish and submits the page for approval.  The page is approved and published and now appears on the Danish variation of the website.

Since Anders received an entirely new page to translate, there were no changes to view; hence, the View Changes button is not available.

Subsequent Modification

Source Modification and Publication

Back in the United States, AdventureWorks decides to announce a new product in its sneak peek lineup.  English language content authors add a paragraph describing this new product, an ultra light sleeping bag, and publish the page. The page now propagates to the Danish variation.

E-mail Notification

Anders receives an e-mail notification that new content is ready for processing.  He visits the appropriate page on the Danish variation site and the English content appears and is waiting for translation.

But wait, there is a lot of English content here, and Anders has already translated most of it.  Only one paragraph has been added.  How will Anders know that he doesn’t need to re-translate the whole page?

It’s at this point that the View Changes button comes to the rescue and is available. 

Please note that View Changes requires the Variations Propagate Pages timer job to be enabled. View Changes only compares changes between a source version of a page and a target version that has been copied using the Variations Propagate Pages operation.

Version Comparison

Anders clicks the button and a version differential window pops up, highlighting the new paragraph that has been added.  Now, Anders knows that only this paragraph has been added and doesn’t have to scan through the new and old versions of the English content to determine what he has to translate. 

Restore Previous Version

Anders decides he prefers to revert back to the translated Danish version of the page as a basis for adding the new paragraph.  With the View Changes window open, Anders knows exactly which paragraph to translate and where it goes.  He adds the new content in Danish, submits for approval, and it’s published live on AdventureWorks’ Danish variation site.  Fantastisk.

In addition to providing target variation site translators with insight into what content has changed when pages are copied from the source, SharePoint 2010 also enables authors on the source to decide when to propagate content to targets. By default in MOSS 2007, when content authors published pages in the source variation site, that page would automatically propagate to all target variation sites, even for small changes that are relevant only to the source variation site.

SharePoint 2010 provides the ability to disable automatic page propagation; source variation site content authors can then use the Update Variations button to propagate content on demand. See my previous post, “Site and Page Propagation” for more information on how to enable this setting.

Thanks for reading! Keep checking back for new blog posts.

Regards
Josh Stickler
Program Manager

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.

Today at the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo, Eric Swift (@eswift), General Manager of SharePoint Marketing announced that Microsoft with be shipping the CMIS Connector for SharePoint as part of the SharePoint Administrator Toolkit by the end of June 2010.  The CMIS Connector for SharePoint provides 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.

CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services is a specification that Microsoft developed in along with IBM, EMC, Alfresco, OpenText, SAP and Oracle to enable greater interoperability between content management repositories and to enable a whole new range of Composite Content Applications that can be build agnostic of the underlying repository.

We see CMIS as a great solution to help our customers more effectively leverage content maintained in a heterogeneous environment but more importantly, we see the specification as a way to enable a whole new range of Composite Content Applications that can be build agnostic of the underlying repository.

For further reading on CMIS, visit these sites:

• Original announcement of the CMIS specification and Microsoft’s involvement
• CMIS reaches the public review stage in the OASIS process
• OASIS CMIS Technical Committee

Public voting on the CMIS specification ends on April 30th and we expect that the specification will be ratified as a standard shortly afterwards.  We are excited that our work on the specification alongside the other leading ECM vendors is coming to fruition and are looking forward to providing support for the standard in SharePoint 2010.

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corporation