SharePoint Intranets – Suggestion for Site Usage

I know that Microsoft have recently invested in giving us some stats to help us make our intranet’s better…

I’ve taken a look at https://<Tenant>.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/siteanalytics.aspx?view=19 and I can see Site/Hub Usage stats on our Site Collection.

However, there are a few things that could be improved:

1. Sync top & bottom widgets – Popular content is locked to 7 days,  it should be in sync with the top selector

Figure: The filters should be in sync (I.e. when you change the top one, the bottom one should change

2. Hub Usage only allows 7 or 30 days – inconsistently the Site Usage allows 7, 30, or 90 days in the timespan selector

3. Missing the users – We should have a widget to see the most active users (we do have widgets to see sites, pages, news, documents… why not users?)

Figure: In Documents – I can see a file name but it would be good to know it’s location

4. Documents – (see bottom right widget) It would be useful to know where the documents are from (i.e. which Site Collection/Site/Library). This could be a card on hover or simply an extra column in the widget.

Provide customized error message

When SharePoint cannot talk to configuration database, provide a customized error message rather than the default Runtime Error.

Figure: Default 500 error message looks bad

Figure: Default 500 error message looks bad

Figure: Detailed error message - for investigation we can disable the custom error message, then detail error message is shown

Figure: Detailed error message – for investigation we can disable the custom error message, then detail error message is shown

We don’t mind the detailed error message shows in the ugly yellow background page, but the default 500 error message should be better.

[This is as per Do you use a customized error page to handle an unhandled error occurs on your website?]

Help me to easily find out who created a library/list

Figure: Who made this?

Figure: Who made this?

Currently, to see who is the author of a library/list like the above, we have two options:

  1. Use SharePoint Manager
    sp-manager
  2. Use PowerShell
    powershell

Both of them are not straightforward, and you have to log on to the server to use either of them.
It costs a few mins and many clicks (not countable) to find out…

The info could be simply exposed to the “list Information” page (can be collapsed by default if there are too much info):

Figure: Add "author" info here

Figure: Add “author” info here

In SharePoint 2016 Preview and Office 365, this has not been improved.