A question I get often, especially around solutions where security is a big concern is “how can we see who looked\opened\updated\deleted an item in our document library. Updates, are easy if you have versioning enabled as it tracks each update in the version history, but what if you don’t want versioning enabled or you need to track the other items? Enter SharePoint audit reports. I previously blogged a detailed post on the audit logs within SharePoint. Basically, once enabled they will record everything that occurs within the site depending on the settings you select. You can find more information on it here. However, the problem with audit reports is you need site collection admin access to see them. This does not work in many instances as most end users don’t (and shouldn’t) have that level of access to your site collection. So how do you get them the reports without manually running the report for them each time they require it? This is what we are going to cover in this series. This post specifically will assist you in preparing the data for your users from the SharePoint GUI.
Quick Note: this may be an old topic, in fact I know it is. I started this blog two years ago and apparently forgot about it. I was going to trash it when I came across it but remembered that I still see a number of requests for setting up audit reports to automatically run for others. So I decided to complete it since it is still relevant for all versions of SharePoint including SharePoint Online
