Monitoring the Records Center site

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2008-04-24

After you have set up and configured your Records Center site, you can create and view reports to help you ensure that records are being managed according to the records management policies. You can also track the number of documents that are being sent to each document library within the Records Center Site. These reports are customizable.

There are two main types of reports:

• Audit reports

• Information management policy usage reports

Audit reports are generated at the site collection level and provide information about when an item has changed in the Records Center site. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides two valuable dimensions to assist companies that need to audit user access to content within a Records Center site. First, Office SharePoint Server provides an administrative user interface in which you to enable and configure the events that are audited. Second, Office SharePoint Server provides a reporting aspect. More specifically, makes it possible to generate Excel workbooks that contain the information about audit events within the Windows SharePoint Services audit log.

Auditing creates two types of performance issues. First, the process of creating audit entries incurs extra database round trips for every logged event. This can impact the throughput of the server when auditing is enabled. Second, storing audit entries can significantly increase the size of the content database, which is where audit entries are stored. This can increase the time it takes to backup the database.

Because of this, you should carefully decide which events to audit. Audit only the events where there is a business justification to capture the data and it is important that every action be logged.

If you are just trying to gather aggregate statistics, such as how many people are visiting your site, auditing is not the appropriate technology. Use usage reporting instead. Usage reporting focuses on larger trends and statistics rather than logging individual data points. For this reason, it does not produce the performance cost that auditing incurs.

Information management policy usage reports can provide data about how and when information management policies are being used on the Records Center site. The types of data contained in an information management policy usage report include the content types in use and the expiration schedule set on each type of content.

Tasks for monitoring the records center site

Monitoring a Records Center site is done by performing the following tasks:

• Create reports Use this procedure when you want to use the raw data in audit logs and policy usage logs to construct a meaningful representation of activity in a Records Center site.

• View reports Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes several audit reports and usage reports that enable administrators to view the contents of the audit logs and policy usage logs for a Records Center site. You can sort, filter, and manipulate the data in these reports to analyze how the records are being used within a Records Center site.

See Also

Concepts

Creating a site to manage records
Configuring an active document site for records management
Configuring an Exchange Server 2007 e-mail server to send records to a Records Center site
Managing holds