Example Tridion Reports

Question

We're exploring what SDL Tridion (Web) customers would be interested seeing in aggregated form in the UI.

I can note what I've seen in projects and what you've done in the community in an answer below, but would appreciate other practical examples.

Participate by offering:

• An example type of report you've created for Tridion (using whatever technology)
• Who the report was for (CMS editor, Marketing, developer, IT, etc.)
• Screenshot, mockup, or whatever visual you may have
• Background on why you needed this report in your setup

Vote up things that would make Web content management easier for you and I'll share the results with the team.

Update: I'm explicitly not interested in the technical solution, my part in this is bringing problems, not the solution. :-)

Answer 1

Stats on publishing history:

• who
• what
• when
• type of item
• Publication

And counts of these items. Graphed, so we can see trends as to the busiest time and quietest time, and use this data to scale up or down publishing machines, in addition to finding out the busiest templates / schemas and optimize those for usability.

Answer 2

1. (SDL Tridion 2011) Stats about which user logs in the CM at what date/time for the System Admins. This helps identify changes which are not versioned like deleting of history, deleting of an Item, Administration Work etc.
2. (SDL Tridion 5.3) Generating a report of all Components and Pages published to a particular publishing target from a website publication for the System Admins - They used it in case they want to analyse the typical time (magnitude) the publishing process might take for publish the whole website again

Answer 3

Not exactly a direct answer to your question, but the addition of history to things like organisational items would enable some reporting options, and remove the need for others.

Answer 4

We've recently been asked to produce a custom page to generate reports in order to identify stale content e.g. Components (and Pages) which have not been published or updated in a long time and who was previously responsible for updating them. This needed to be run across many publications.

This information is available via messing around with advanced search queries but the client wanted a nice interface to do this automatically and graphs etc.

Answer 5

I've done a fair few of these, but I guess the main ones were:

1. A list of content that had been updated but not published to production.

This was essentially a comparison of the date the Page was last published to production vs the date each Component was edited and any difference flagged.

Purpose: To provide evidence needed that existing processes didn't work effectively, and to ensure published websites actually had the most up to date, approved content.

2. A list of Components of a particular Schema, detailing the metadata stored against each Component.

Purpose: Both a content inventory by category, and to validate that editors had created the content correctly (there were certain manual rules that needed to be followed that are now managed by events).

3. A list of duplicate binary filenames by blueprint/publication.

Purpose: To avoid publishing issues!

All outputs were tab-separated CSV because they were used only by the team.

Answer 6

Q1. An example type of report you've created for Tridion (using whatever technology)

I've been asked in the past for an interface/report which details the activity (login, updating content, publishing, etc.) for individual users in the system, grouped by User Group.

Q2. Who the report was for (CMS editor, Marketing, developer, IT, etc.)

The report was for the centralised 'Super User' editorial team within the organisation

Q3. Screenshot, mockup, or whatever visual you may have

This was only ever discussed, and never implemented, I'm afraid.

Q4. Background on why you needed this report in your setup

This interface/report would allow the centralised team to see which of their distributed country-specific content teams were most active within in the system. It would help them to identify which country editors may need further support or training and to assess the value that they were getting from having distributed teams (or not!).

Answer 7

4 years back I implemented a generic KPI reporting framework for a client.

The KPI's were grouped into Business and Technical, charted a certain measurement over time (span set by the user) and gave the user the ability to filter on target, individual/all/groups of publications and (where appropriate) URL path.

Business:

• Blueprint Factor (percentage of global vs local content in site)
• Time to Market (time difference between page being first published to staging and published to live in all selected locales)
• Live in publications (number of publications which given URL is live)
• Published Pages (number of pages published)
• Registered Users (number of Audience Manager subscriptions)

Technical:

• Max pages published per hour
• Average publish time
• Publishing Errors

Its a generic framework, which can be extended for whatever reports you need, and SDL PS has the source code for this, for more information mail me, David Forster or Jan Horsman.

Heres a screenshot of one of the reports to give you a flavour:

Answer 8

We have the following reports that we are using with 2013 today.

Publisher reports

• Showing published content and pages across all publications based on user filters and dates with sorting and export feature included
• Show unpublishing activity with the content and pages based on user filters and dates with sorting and export feature included

Content reports

• Modified content items based on user defined date range and selected publications, with user filter and date filter and sorting / export feature included
• Publishing history based on user defined date range and selected publications, with user filter and date filter and sorting / export feature included
• All content and pages published to Active ONLY (called audit reports) based on user defined date range and selected publications, with user filter and date filter and sorting / export feature included

We have some additional requirements that we are debating on the need to be implemented as reports. All of the above are mostly for IT purposes. I will come back and edit the post based any additional user requirements.

I am not posting the technical implementation details here since this is not a technical question.

Answer 9

The "Tridion BA Toolkit" was a CoreService script I created to output Tridion Sites authorization settings including:

• Publications
• User groups
• Scope
• Permissions

The generated .CSV report shows what the settings are for a current CMS environment to document and troubleshoot a current setup. This also provides instructions and examples for application admins for how to apply settings in the future.