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.

Over the course of the next few days, a team from Redmond will be making their way to Philadelphia.  Our goal?  To bring the SharePoint 2010 story to the East Coast of the USA through a series of educational sessions and our Customer Immersion Experience.  We’ll be delivering this content at the AIIM Expo + Conference and we hope you can join us to learn from the people behind the product.  If you register for a main conference pass, you’ll get access to 28 sessions covering product capabilities and best practices.  In addition, if you register (for FREE) for entry to the Expo Hall, you’ll have access to our Customer Immersion Experience where you can get hands on with the latest release of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

We’re excited about the upcoming release of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and are looking forward to meeting with you in Philadelphia.  Before we head out East, I’d like to introduce you to our speakers:

This is the largest gathering of Microsoft speakers since our SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last year and we’re looking forward to meeting you in person next week.  We hope you can attend the SharePoint 2010 Summit @ AIIM Expo or join us on the Expo Hall floor.  Be sure to bring your burning SharePoint questions and make the most of this opportunity to talk with the experts.

Ryan Duguid
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Corporation

Hi everyone, I am Quentin Christensen and I work on document and records management functionality for SharePoint. Electronic discovery (commonly referred to as eDiscovery) is an area we are supporting with new set of capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010. In case you are not familiar with eDiscovery, it is the process of finding, preserving, analyzing and producing content in electronic formats as required by litigation or investigations. eDiscovery is an important concern for all of our customers and given that SharePoint has grown to be an integral part of collaboration, document, and records management for many organizations, we recognize the need to support the eDiscovery process for SharePoint content.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 included a hold feature that could be used for eDiscovery, but it was scoped to the Records Center site template. With SharePoint Server 2010 the eDiscovery capabilities have been greatly expanded to provide more functionality and the power to use these features across your entire SharePoint deployment.

In this post, I want to highlight three major improvements in SharePoint that support eDiscovery. You can:

• Manage holds and conduct eDiscovery searches on any site collection
• Use SharePoint Server Search or FAST Search for SharePoint out of box to search and process content
• Automatically copy eDiscovery search results to a separate repository for further analysis

Read on to learn how SharePoint Server 2010 can support your eDiscovery initiatives and provide you with the tools you need to manage holds, identify, and collect SharePoint content.

The eDiscovery Process

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model from EDRM (edrm.net) provides an overview of the different parts of the eDiscovery process:

SharePoint Sever 2010 addresses the Information Management, Identification, Preservation and Collection stages. While this blog post will focus mostly on the identification, preservation and collection components, SharePoint provides a rich Information Management platform for Collaboration, Social Computing, Document Management and Records Management.  This means that you can take a proactive approach to eDiscovery by putting a governance framework in place and using appropriate disposition policies to expire content. Managing content and deleting it when it is no longer needed will reduce the amount of content that must be indexed and searched, and collected for eDiscovery.  The result is that eDiscovery costs can be dramatically reduced, changing the problem from finding a needle in a hay stack to finding a needle in a hay bale. Ultimately, the key to achieving legal compliance for eDiscovery obligations is built upon a foundation of robust Information Management.

When an eDiscovery event occurs, such as a receipt of complaint, discovery, or notice of potential legal claim, the identification stage begins. Content that may be subject to eDiscovery must be identified and searches are conducted to find that content. That content needs to be preserved and at some point, the content will be collected.

The eDiscovery Features

Hold and eDiscovery

Hold and eDiscovery is a site level feature that can be activated on any site.

Activating this feature creates a new category in Site Settings that provides links to Holds and Hold Reports lists. There is also a page to discover and hold content that allows you to search for content and add it to a hold. Once the Hold and eDiscovery feature is activated you can create holds and add to hold any content in the site collection. By default only Site Collection administrators have access to the Hold and eDiscovery pages. To give other users permission, add them to the permissions list for the Hold Reports and Holds lists. This will also give access to the Discover and hold content page.

You can manually locate content in SharePoint and add it to a hold, or you can search for content and add the search results to a hold. With the Hold and eDiscovery feature you can create holds in the hold list and then manually add content to the relevant hold by clicking on Compliance Details from the drop down menu for individual items.

Then click on the link to Add/Remove from hold.

And you can select the relevant hold to add to or remove from.

By manually adding an item to hold you will block editing and deletion of that item until it is released from hold. You will notice that the document now has a lock icon showing that it cannot be edited or deleted.

Each night a report for each hold is generated by a timer job. If you need a hold report faster you can manually run the Hold Processing and Reporting timer job in Central Administration.

Search and Process

You can manually add items to hold on any site collection, which is great. But that doesn’t help you find the content you don’t already know about. What if you have a large amount of items you want to find and add to a hold? For that you can use the features on the Discover and hold content page, which is a settings page in Site Settings. From this page you can specify a search query and then preview the results. The configured search service (SharePoint Search Server or FAST Search for SharePoint) will automatically be used. You can then select the option to keep items on hold in place so they cannot be edited or deleted, or if you have configured a Content Organizer Send to location in Central Administration you can have content copied to another site and placed on hold. You may want to create a separate records center site for a particular hold to store all content related to that hold. The Content Organizer is a new SharePoint Server 2010 feature based on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Document Router with richer functionality to automatically classify content based on Content Type or metadata properties. Look for a future blog post covering the Content Organizer.

Holding content in place is recommended if you want to leave content in the location is was created with all the rich context that SharePoint provides, while blocking deletion and editing of content. Be aware that this will prevent users from modifying items. If you prefer users to continue editing documents, then use the copy to another location approach.

When searching and processing, the search will by default be scoped to the entire Site Collection and run with elevated permissions so all content can be discovered. The search can be scoped to specific sites and you can also preview search results before adding the results to a hold. Items can be placed on multiple holds and compliance details will show all of the holds that are applied to an item.

In summary, SharePoint Server 2010 contains key features that make it an essential aspect of your eDiscovery strategy. With the new SharePoint Server 2010 capabilities you can easily apply proper retention policies for all content and make it easier to discover content if an eDiscovery event occurs. eDiscovery often prescribes tight deadlines for production. SharePoint 2010 helps you find the right content and deliver it faster.

Quentin Christensen
Program Manager – Document and Records Management
Microsoft