Most enterprises use third-party analytics tools for tracking SharePoint and Office 365 usage. Marketing teams often use tools like Google Analytics, WebTrends, and Piwik for public analytics, so those become the de facto standards for internal analytics as well.

Each is a great option, but web analytics platforms don’t really understand the intricacies of SharePoint and Office 365. For instance, there’s absolutely no way to filter by specific sites, site collections, or lists by default.

Although SharePoint natively tracks some useful data such as daily hits per site, the built-in interfaces for extracting that data have always been very limited. This has been especially true since SharePoint 2013 re-engineered the analytics engine and hid most reports.

When it comes to SharePoint and Office 365 sites, there are common questions you’re likely to ask:

1. Which of my sites are most active? Are there dormant sites we should retire?
2. Which users are most engaged? Are there users completely avoiding the intranet?
3. Besides pages, which content is most popular?

Fortunately, it’s possible to answer each of those questions through a one-time configuration that will reap long-term rewards.

At this month’s Future of SharePoint event, Jeff Teper announced several exciting changes to the SharePoint roadmap. This is all welcome news for a platform whose public momentum has slowed in recent years.

End-User Announcements

First and foremost, SharePoint will soon have a first-class app on iOS, Android, and Windows phone devices. Mobile SharePoint has usually been a frustrating experience due to unfriendly default interfaces, poorly-designed customizations, and frustrating authentication. Microsoft is eliminating many of those barriers by making lists, libraries, users, search, and Delve features available from a single-click on any device. I’m looking forward to testing it in the next month.

SharePoint is also getting a new homepage in Office 365. The new look closely aligns with Delve, showing your most frequently-accessed team sites in a clean tile-based interface. This might not be a welcome change for highly-branded intranets, but it will be an intuitive default for new users.

There are also new templates for team sites and document libraries, which have been controversial. Overall, the new team site design looks modern, flexible, and responsive for mobile devices. This was one of many templates sorely in need of a refresh, so it’s nice to see Microsoft revisiting user experience around the core SharePoint building blocks.

While each of those updates is great news for end-users, developers will be most excited about the new development model named “SharePoint Framework”.

Microsoft released SharePoint 2016 to manufacturing yesterday.

Whereas recent SharePoint releases have been “revolutionary”, this is more of an “evolutionary” release, with subtle improvements to the user experience and underlying architecture.

Improvements

You can check out a list of new and enhanced features here on TechNet.

Highlights include: