SharePoint Auditing

SharePoint out of the box auditing features is giving us very good functionalities for keeping track of opening or downloading documents, deleting or restoring items, editing users and permissions and many more, by default its turn off on top site collection level. 

Configuring Settings for Auditing

The following screenshot shows that how we can configure audit settings from main top level site collection-> site settings-> configure audit settings. 

 

 

 

 

Viewing Reports for Auditing

 
The following screenshot shows the various auditing reports available to administrators, who can view them through top-level site settings.   

 
When we clicked on any of the above reports, it will generate XML excel document which we can save to local disk or open for viewing purpose. 

 

Limitation for audit reports:

1. the generated XML excel document report don’t have user friendly data, like in “Event Data” column, it will display user id, group id instead of friendly user name and group name, it showing site collection GUID instead of Site Collection name and many more.

2. For viewing of auditing reports, user needs site collection administrator’s rights and user can see reports from going to top level site collection. 

 

3. If we have large server farm with plenty of SharePoint sites under one site collection level, then at some point, we can have performance issue due to tracking all users’ requests for audit purpose. 

We can write custom code into visual studio and generate audit log reports as per our requirements.

I have also searched on the internet for tool and web part to display and capture audit trail reports from SharePoint.

Here is link for useful AvePoint tool for SharePoint auditing

http://www.sharepointreviews.com/component/content/article/69-sharepoint-auditing/210-DocAve-Auditor-for-SharePoint-by-AvePoint.html 

Below are some good useful links which talks about how to configure auditing, viewing reports and how to write custom code for generating user friendly reports.
 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spauditentry.aspx SPAuditEntry Class which will use for writing custom event data into audit report.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397403.aspx Item Level Auditing in SharePoint 

http://www.developer.com/net/net/article.php/3755726  Source code for custom audit log reports 
 

 

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101000051033.aspx how to view audit log reports

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc794261.aspx custom auditing