You can find outdated content on every portal: pages, documents and even whole sites. As many SharePoint sites are closely integrated with different company information services, contain personal and commercial data, outdated content must be treated with utmost care.
Well, what dangers can they carry:
- Forgotten pages may occur as a result of test implementations and other experiments and contain unsafe content.
- Forgotten documents may contain confidential data and can be found by internal or external search service. It may damage the reputation of the company.
- Forgotten sites can indicate bad adaptation of SharePoint technologies, and therefore insufficient efficiency of its implementation and popularization arrangements.
Portal analysis with HarePoint Analytics for SharePoint allows you to quickly identify outdated content.
Forgotten pages
Report “Not used pages” shows the list of all pages, which haven’t been visited since the specified date. The report also points the author of the page and the last user to visit the page:
A large list of pages with the names containing "test" or "temp" in the report may indicate a lack of adequate regulation in development department, or problems with its execution.
Forgotten documents
Report “Not used documents” shows the list of unused documents on the site or the collection of sites.
Grouping by document location will help to get an overall view on the picture at big nodes:
Using filter “(Not defined)” by field “Last viewed by” will identify the document libraries, the content of which never worried anybody:
It is possible that the place of such documents is in the archive. Or the employees don’t know that these documents are available on the SharePoint portal.
Forgotten sites
Report “Site summary” shows the list of sites in the collection and their traffic for the chosen period.
The presence of sites with zero traffic may indicate low adaptation of SharePoint technologies among employees and also among the developers of web sites. Either the authors were not able to make the site due to some problems, or they were unable to present it to their audience. In any case, the projects, to which time and money was spent, showed zero effectiveness, and these cases require careful study.
Conclusions
Reports of HarePoint Analytics can help you to easily identify the problems in the organization, and even a quick analysis of the outdated content can reduce the possibility of leaks and threats, reveal the effectiveness of projects and assess the level of adaptation of SharePoint technologies in different departments of the organization.