Posted On February 17, 2010 at 22:33 in Uncategorized
Gartner released last month the results of its EXP (Gartner Executive Program) survey, covering responses from 1,586 CIOs representing more than $126 billion in corporate and public-sector IT spending across 41 countries and 27 industries.
Two ‘Top Ten‘ lists emerged from that survey, outlining Technology and Business Priorities for 2010, and the #3 Business Priority is Increasing the use of (web) analytics. Web analytics are an important tool for any organization, and can help identify and maintain a competitive advantage and optimize the customer’s online experience. From Gartner:
CIOs see 2010 as an opportunity to accelerate IT’s transition from a support function to strategic contributor focused on innovation and competitive advantage’.
Also,
Gartner EXP’s CIO survey findings show that, in the near term, business expectations and CIO strategies appear stable, with a continued focus on business process improvement, cost reduction and analytics.
The Top 10 Business Priorities for 2010, according to Gartner:
- Improving business processes
- Cutting costs
- Increasing the use of analytics
- Improving enterprise effectiveness
- Attracting new customers
- Managing change initiatives
- Innovation in products and services creation
- More effective targeting
- Consolidating business operations
- Growing customer relationships
Shortly after the release of the research, CMSwire.com opened a poll (closed now) asking ‘How useful is your web analytics data‘. They wanted to know, before anything else, what companies who use analytics are doing with the data they have: Only 31% indicated that the data drives a lot of their decisions, while 27% indicated that they don’t feel the data is being used well at all. Having an analytics solution is only the beginning.
Key challenges in web analytics
In July 2009 Bill Gassman from Gartner released a report entitled Key Challenges in Web Analytics. In the report, Bill outlines key findings and recommendations every company should adopt, when facing a strategic web analytics initiative. According to Bill, web analytics is more than selecting the right solution (free/commercial, on-premise/SaaS) but also hiring and empowering a web analyst that can use the tool (and the authority given by the initiative) and make informed decisions, based on the analytics data.
The key findings:
- The potential for measurable improvement varies with the purpose of the site. Investments in analytics should match the potential for gain.
- Free product offerings are tempting, and a good learning tool, but strategic initiatives with an opportunity for large gains in site yield should choose commercial products.
- Web analysts are hard to find and retain, yet are a critical element in a successful initiative and must be supported by business management.
Recommendations:
- When calculating the return on investment (ROI) for a Web analytics initiative, treat it as an attributing factor within a customer-centric Web strategy. Without Web analytics, yield gain will be suboptimal, but other parts of the process, such as content management, campaigns and site design, also contribute to the gain.
- Narrow a shortlist of Web analytics vendor choices to those that answer the big question, which is software as a service (SaaS) or on premises, then concentrate on price, support and “ecosystem” partners.
- Give the role of Web analyst authority and responsibility, then find someone that can use it.
The report is available for download [PDF] at Gartner.com (no registration required).
Links:
Gartner EXP Worldwide survey – Business and Technology Priorities for 2010
CMSwire poll – how useful is your web analytics data
Gartner – key challenges in web analytics 2009
Posted by Dvir Reznik · Tags: gartner, it priorities 2010, sharepoint analytics, sharepoint usage repoting, usage reporting, Web analytics · No Comments »
Posted On February 5, 2010 at 03:36 in Uncategorized
Updated Feb. 11th.
A month into 2010 and we’re working hard on making CardioLog better. Following a successful 2009, with numerous new customers, we sat down – product and marketing teams, trying to prioritize the requests we received from our customers, our partners, our own vision regarding the product, analysts perspective on analytics and Microsoft’s direction with SharePoint 2010. Not an easy task.
From all of that input we compiled our roadmap for 2010, which is available here. We welcome your feedback, and will take any request under consideration, but we cannot promise it will find its way to production. Some highlights that will become available, soon:
- CardioLog 2010 Enterprise
- Integration with SSP Profiles
- Retrieval of the Portal Tree structure with the SharePoint API
- Import usage data from SharePoint 2010
- Report segmentation by user profiles
- Report segmentation by SharePoint groups and audiences
- CardioLog Lite for SharePoint 2010
- Funnel reports
- Site overlay
- And more
Again, the full list is available on our website.
We also launched ‘CardioLog 2010 for SharePoint 2010 Beta Program’, which will allow our customers to evaluate the integration with SharePoint 2010. We have big plans for the next release of SharePoint, here’s what we’re working on:
- As with MOSS, CardioLog will provide an independent JavaScript tracking agent for collecting browser activity for SharePoint 2010
- Usage reports will be available for data collected by either CardioLog or SharePoint 2010 (Logging DB)
- CardioLog will continue to provide enhanced reporting segments through integration with SharePoint 2010 SSP Profiles, SharePoint 2010 groups and security info, SharePoint 2010 document metadata, Active Directory user attributes, and more
- We plan to track usage within the SharePoint 2010 Workspace (offline experience)
- CardioLog reports will be available as SharePoint 2010 web parts
As you can tell – we have our hands full.
We also made some adjustments to our Support Policy, and continue to update the Forum and FAQs with feedback we receive from customers, analytics tips and best practices. Now is also the time for you to start following CardioLog on twitter – to receive product updates, tips & tricks, announcements and more.
CardioLog Standard
We also introduced a new addition to our portfolio – CardioLog Standard. The new edition is ideal for small and mid-sized companies, starting to explore the possibilities of analytics, looking for an affordable yet accurate solution – designed for Microsoft SharePoint portals. CardioLog Standard boosts roughly the same features as our Professional Edition, with some limitations (see table). If you’re looking for a small-sized, on-premise web analytics solution, our Standard Edition is your choice. You can download a free trial version now.
Posted by Dvir Reznik · Tags: cardiolog 2010 for sharepoint 2010, intlock, microsoft, moss, roadmap, sharepoint 2010, sharepoint 2010 beta, sharepoint analytics, usage reporting, usage reports · 1 Comment »
Posted On January 25, 2010 at 14:12 in Uncategorized
With hundreds of customers around the world, CardioLog has become one of the leading usage reporting solutions for SharePoint. In the very near future we’ll introduce CardioLog 2010, for our 3 subscription editions: Standard, Professional and Enterprise. CardioLog 2010 Lite will be introduced shortly after.
CardioLog 2010 will include some UI changes, introduce new reports, planned integration with SharePoint 2010 and (as with any software) hotfixes for known issues. Most of the additions we included in the reports and UI came from our customers, and we thank you for helping us make CardioLog better.
CardioLog 2010 for SharePoint - Real-time Center
The screenshots are not final, but you can see some of the UI changes, compared to the current edition:
- All actions are performed from a topnav instead of ‘right-click’
- Reports can be exported to PDF (on top of the existing Excel and Webpart)
- Moved the ‘Favorites’ view alongside the ‘Object Explorer’ as a tab, for easier access to your sites
- Each widget has ‘Report Actions’ button, for further customization (based on Permissions of course)
- Improved color scheme
CardioLog 2010 for SharePoint - Report Center
With the announcement of SharePoint 2010 just around the corner, we are already testing CardioLog with the Beta version of SP2010, and we’ll share more information along the way. As with any upgrade, it’s always recommended to do some ‘house cleaning’, see what pages can be archived or were not accessed for a long time. With CardioLog you can build a ‘house cleaning’ report, and generate it periodically, to get an understanding of what’s going on:
CardioLog for SharePoint - House Cleaning: what pages/sites received no hits
Under the ‘Report Center’, right-click and pick ‘Add report’. From the wizard choose ‘Blank report’, and then name your report and decide on a layout. Once the report dashboard is created, you need to add the Page Views reports, in a Table layout (see above screenshot). Click on Preferences and in the left pane, under Advanced, change the value of ‘Minimum result count’ to ’0′ (zero) and order by ‘Descending’. Finally, make sure you exclude your editors from the ‘Page Views’: expand Filter and under Users and Groups exclude the content editors group from the count (see below screenshot). That’s it.
CardioLog for SharePoint - House Cleaning: change minimum value to '0'
Posted by Dvir Reznik · Tags: analytics, cardiolog 2010, how-to, microsoft sharepoint, moss2010, tutorial, usage reporting · 1 Comment »
