I’m happy to announce the public beta of Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint Reports On Demand, a new free SharePoint product that provides the ability to get reports without installing anything on the server.  This new reporting functionality requires simply a simple download, a client install on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7.  You put your URL or URLs in the tool for reporting.  If you are a site collection admin you can get recursive storage reports which include sizes of the various webs, including file type reports, and other reports to help understand your content storage.

These reports leverage the Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure to make updates to the client software.  The product is designed to be installed with no install on the server.  The calls are from the client to the web services of the site.  Hence the SharePoint web services are required, but they are on by default.  These Silverlight reports and the update with Azure provides a platform of reporting that can continue to grow.

“Site Administrator Reports OnDemand for SharePoint provides free overview reports for an unlimited number of SharePoint sites. The information in these reports allows you to assess the scope of the site you’re reviewing, understand how it is being used, and determine site storage metrics.”

Get it at Quest.com/ReportsforSharePoint – No registration required!

If you need any help or have any problems, there is a Reports for SharePoint forum where you can get help either from the community or from the team. 

Who can use it?

SharePoint Server Admins, Site Collection Admins, even Site Administrators.  All you really have to have is rights to get data out of the web services, so a viewer could ultimately get reports.

Is it designed for Enterprises or as a Cloud?

It can be used for either SharePoint Online or On premise, in your own environment.

Will I eventually have to pay for it?

No, the design is to keep it free as a fully working sample of what can be done.  Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint for example has a lot more functionality and will remain the pay for version.

What techologies are used for the reports?

Silverlight 3

What browser and what SharePoint platform was this designed for?

It was designed to be cross browser with support for SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010.  It does require the Silverlight browser plug in.

Where are the reports stored?

Stored in client silverlight storage cache

Does it scale, given this is designed against web services?

It was tested with 100,000 and we’ll truncate the report at 10,000 items in a given list or library

What is the main purpose of these reports?

identifying large documents, understanding your storage better including files by type, understanding storage in versions

Troubleshooting – Requires .NET 3.51 SP1, local admin access to your box, access to the SharePoint servers with Windows accounts (doesn’t work with Forms) most issues are related to not having either the right access locally or with access to the servers or authentication methods not being supported.