Rich SharePoint content insights with DocRead and Power BI

DocRead is an add-on for SharePoint that allows you to target and track content to the right users in your organization.

DocRead comes with a report suite that is accessed from the DocRead admin pages inside SharePoint. Whilst powerful out of the box, it’s impossible for the suite to cover more customized reporting requirements. Also, because the reporting suite runs inside of SharePoint web pages (with no dedicated reporting engine) it can struggle with large data sets containing hundreds of thousands of rows.

In this post we are going to show how you can use Power BI to create a “Document Reading Dashboard” using the DocRead data. This dashboard can be used to show the status of the reading tasks associated with a specific document (these tasks are automatically generated, and managed by DocRead ).

With its own dedicated reporting engine (VertiPaq - “Brains & Muscles” behind Power BI), Power BI has no problem working with large data sets. When combined with the rich data created by DocRead, it allows you to create beautiful and powerful reports giving insights about how your SharePoint content is being targeted, read and acknowledged by your users. These reports can also be used to demonstrate to regulators how you are communicating, targeting and tracking your Policies, Procedures (and any other important content) and thus ensuring that your employees remain compliant with them.

The “Document Reading Dashboard“ that we are going to build in this post will look like this:

The dashboard above uses the standard data view called "Readership.vwTaskInfo" available in the DocRead database (find more information here). It contains a slicer at the top of the page that allows you to select a specific document. The table then shows a list of all employees who need to read that document and the date they did so. If the employee has not completed their reading task, then this will be shown as either overdue (if the due date has passed) or assigned. 

The visualizations on the left include:

• Gauge showing the proportion of completed tasks compared to the total number of tasks.
• Donut chart showing the number or reading tasks by status (assigned, completed or overdue) and their proportionate percentages.
• Card displaying the latest due date. Once this date has been reached, and assuming everyone who needs to read it has done so, it can be archived.

Slicer

1) Select the Slicer visualization as shown below. This will add a slicer onto your report canvas. Resize it and move it to the top right corner of your report canvas.

2) From the 'Readership vwTaskInfo' table, select 'DocumentName', or click and drag it into the Slicer Field.

3) Click on the down arrow for this field and select 'Rename for this visual'.

4) Add a space into the field name so it displays as 'Document Name'.

5) On the report canvas, click the down arrow in the top right corner of the slicer and select 'Dropdown'.

6) Your slicer is now ready. Notice how the data in the table changes as you select different documents. 

Donut chart

1) Select the donut chart visualization.

2) From the 'Readership vwTaskInfo' table, select 'RealStatus' and drag it into the Legend Field. Use the same data in the Values field but ensure that this will be displayed as a 'Count of' the RealStatus.

3) Select the paint roller icon to change the colors for the different classes of reading status. Expand the 'Data Colors' option and amend the display colors to your preference. I used green for completed tasks, red for overdue tasks and amber for tasks that have been assigned but are not overdue. I also set the Legend to 'on' so this information is displayed in the visualization.

4) the donut chart is now ready, notice how the values change when you select a different document.

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