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:

1. Improving business processes
2. Cutting costs
3. Increasing the use of analytics
4. Improving enterprise effectiveness
5. Attracting new customers
6. Managing change initiatives
7. Innovation in products and services creation
8. More effective targeting
9. Consolidating business operations
10. 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

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.

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'

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, and not due to lack of material, believe me.
I’ve been extremely busy at work (it’s year-end, you know), trying to juggle several things at the same time, prioritizing, learning SP, not to mention the army reserve tour that ‘landed’ on me this month.

Intlock is doing very well, thank you for asking. I’m amazed at the number of requests we receive daily, to either download and install our free edition or demo and trial one of our licensed based editions. We closed couple of major opportunities this month and I’ll write about those soon.

Sharepoint is all about collaboration and at Intlock we preach for the exact same thing. Our solution, CardioLog, is the leading usage reporting solution in the market, thanks to these three factors:

• CardioLog is aware of your portal structure;
• CardioLog is an open platform solution;
• CardioLog is familiar with your Sharepoint users

Doing business in a flat world has truly transformed the way businesses interact and work with one another, not to mention the endless possibilities for the customer – it has a global reach, to any vendor, anywhere in the world, in a click of a button.

Intlock Partners Program provides just that – the opportunity to do business, together, worldwide. Our program enables complementary solution providers, integrators and distributors to have all business, marketing, and technological resources for offering best-of-breed portal control and monitoring to their solution offerings. Our current partners are already reaping the benefits either as VAR (value-added resellers) or Technology Partners.

If you’d like to hear more about Intlock Partners Program and understand how we can enjoy a win-win joint venture, drop me a line at dvir.reznik at intlock dot com.

Intlock will be one of the exhibitors at the Sharepoint Conference 2009, held later this month in Las Vegas.
We have some cool demos and presentations lined up for you – and a surprise that you don’t want to miss!!! I will elaborate more soon, but you definitely want to visit our booth, #1028.

Unfortunately I won’t attend the conference this year so we can’t meet in person, but there will be plenty of action nevertheless, courtesy of Elan Sasson (our CEO and my boss) and the lovely and talented Sigalit Hassid (Project Manager). Both can answer any question you may have.

We’ll be happy to meet you in person and set aside a dedicated time to discuss, hold a private demo, explore joint ventures or conduct interviews with journalists and bloggers. Fill out this short form and we’ll see you in Las Vegas.

One of the people I started following and RSSing is Florian Pihs from MRM Worldwide in Beijing.
I really liked his ‘10 simple rules for winning through web analytics‘ presentation as it outlines in 7 slides why web analytics is important for any business, regardless of your audience.

3 days into my new job at IntLock and I have lots of items in my To-Do list, the most important ones are a) learning how Sharepoint is built (from an architecture point of view, web-parts and all) and b) terms and definitions relating to web analytics. Getting to know IntLock and CardioLog goes without saying…

IntLock was founded is 2005 and operates in the web analytics scene. Our solution (video), CardioLog, is considered one of the leading Sharepoint Usage Reporting solutions. CardioLog integrates with the portal structure (tree) and ‘knows’ its content and metadata as well – thus enabling us to present an accurate snapshot of your website: customer site (B2C), partner/agents site (B2B) and employee portal (intranet). CardioLog can also pull data from your AD (active directory) to provide a deeper understanding of how your users (and groups) access the site.

CardioLog comes in 3 flavors: Lite (free), Professional and Enterprise. The main differences are outlined in the table below, along with cost of course. The main diffrentiators are what reports come out-of-the-box, the # of page views per month supported and # of years saved for hostory data. Wanna build your own reports? Get your copy of our SDK and start building. You welcome to download CardioLog Lite for free right now, and start making sense (and $$$) of your traffic. You can also download a free 30-day trial of our Enterprise Edition, with more features and reports. As always, we’re here to help.

CardioLog offers much more than the built-in Sharepoint 2007 Reporting, and is also an excellent alternative for Google Analytics. Here’s what made the difference for some of our customers:

• Independent JavaScript agent
• Data aggregation according to portal hierarchy (not URL-based)
• Data filtering according to portal metadata
• Tracking of portal-specific user activities
• Visitor segmentation by Active Directory attributes
• Exporting reports to SharePoint 2007 web parts
• Built-in integration with other enterprise applications (e.g., CRM, ERP)

While you’re downloading CardioLog and analyzing traffic, I’ll get back to my reading: Web Analytics – An Hour A Day, by Avinash Kaushik for now (1 hour per day) and some Sharepoint tutorials and blogs for later. If you have any favorite blogs, tweeple or sites, comment away