The new Quest Site Administrator Reports OnDemand that was released yesterday is pretty.
You get it at http://www.quest.com/reportsforsharepoint
Description from Quest's website:
"This new free web hosted tool allows you unlimited core Site reporting as well as a portal to content within SharePointforAll. You can run a site storage usage report on any SharePoint 2007 or 2010 site that you have access to. This tool is currently in Beta so visuals may change from time to time and updates are available immediately as soon as we update the app.
Site Administrator Reports OnDemand is hosted in Microsoft's new Cloud platfrom Azure and leverages Silverlight for its visuals."
You get a single page report with the following data:
- Site Metrics – summary of the number of sub-sites, total lists, document libraries, doc size, and a total content storage size.
- Site Sizes – the sizes of individual sites in a collection
- Document Sizes – largest files
- Document Type Sizes – storage usage by document type
- Storage Space Distribution – Content vs. versioning
The displays can be changed from data to bar or pie charts.
I believe most of that data can already be seen by site collection administrators, but this is a more concise summary that takes the data already available and puts it into a pretty graphic format.
Potential points to consider…
It is available for free to be used by anyone that has local administrator rights on their PC and full control over a site collection/site.
It requires no installation on a server so we have zero control or visibility into who runs them.
The query runs for a long time and may impact performance – especially if more than one is being run at the same time. Report on an average site collection took 66 minutes to generate (6.38 GB)
The reports are stored on the local machine Silverlight storage cache so are not available to anyone else and there seems no way to export. However, the good thing there is that once the report is run, the cached report is available until the admin clicks "Update" to rerun the query.
Lastly, since it uses Quest's website to do the analysis you expose as much data as your credentials allow in SharePoint – even behind firewalls since you've already made the connection. While I am not concerned about Quest itself, it does raise concerns that must be addressed to management and security officers about exposure of internal data to an outside party. And I've seen nothing to which I can refer them on Quest's website. It may be there, but it escapes my search at the moment.
I'm still testing to see if there is impact in large deployments with distributed site collection management. Until then, if anyone has an analysis I would be happy to know what you found.
Play nice and Share. Get the Point?