SharePoint Auditing

There has long since been a need for a good auditing tool for SharePoint.  There are several options on the market such as the one from Syntergy, but the problem is that most of these solutions achieve their ability to audit what goes on in SharePoint by adding table triggers to your SharePoint databases.

Microsoft does not support the direct modification of either structure or data of any of the SharePoint databases and doing so effectively violates your SharePoint support agreement.

It stands to reason then that installing a product that adds triggers to your tables will effectively place you in the no man’s land that is Unsupported SharePoint.  This would place a very tough decision in front of most of my clients.  I’ve seen people walk away from using SharePoint as a whole because clear auditing could not be done.  Add to that the growing trend toward records management and retention compliance and it is evident that a good auditing tool has been desperately needed for some time now.

Fortunately, I picked up a post from Anil Rhemtulla from Aliantiz about their product called Web Obs.  I cursory scan of the features seems very promising to me and it is quite possible that this might be the "holy grail" of SharePoint auditing as we know it.  Unfortunately there does not seem to be a trail version for download, but maybe the company would work with potential buyers on such issues.

Either way, we may finally have a good tool to do SharePoint auditing with that does NOT violate Microsoft’s support policies. 

Later
C