Determining the most popular items in a document library in SharePoint 2013
Posted
Thursday, March 28, 2013 2:39 PM
by
CoreyRoth
With the combination of analytics and search in SharePoint 2013, there is a heap of new features to help determine which content is actually being used. No longer is this information buried in reports for administrators, but it in fact is available right from the ribbon in a document library. Maybe you have even noticed the Most Popular Items button in the ribbon already. You can find it on the library tab in the middle.
Click on it and you will be taken to a custom search results screen that shows you recent views and total views.
What’s nice is that you can even search and refine within the report if you are looking for something specific. You can also click on the Popularity Trends link to get a nice graph of the usage of the file over time.
Behind the scenes, this report is powered by the Popular result source. You can also use this source to look for popular items across your entire index. As a developer, the possibilities are quite interesting.
My particular tenant doesn’t have a ton of usage, but if you’re already running SharePoint 2013 you might be able to extract some valuable insights from this report. Try it out today.