One of the first tasks I've been faced with in my new job is to get some sort of SharePoint usage reporting working. At first I thought this would be nice and easy, after all, SharePoint comes with a nice set of usage reporting which could simply be plugged in to some custom reporting modules - easy, yes?

No. The problem comes in that they want reporting for groups of users. These groups are currently ill-defined, conceptual groupings, so part of the first challenge is to deal with that by getting user management set up. For the time being I've put that off while I concentrate on a method for getting the reports working at all, with the added information that's required. After some hours of hunting I did manage to find this lovely post which was enough to make a start at least.

So after numerous meetings we have now settled on the actual information that needs to be reported, and I've thrown together a quick and dirty system design which'll allow for all of the stats processing to be done away from the SharePoint farm other than the initial collection. So far I've only got the usage receiver itself coded, since interfaces need to go through a few more discussions (Silverlight or no Silverlight, how customizable do the reports need to be, and so on) but I do at least seem to be getting a nice lost of HTTP posts going out with the information and can start building a web service to receive and log them.

If nothing else this should at least keep me out of trouble for a while. Any suggestions or ideas others might have, either for this area or the user management, are more than welcome.