The repository for Social Squared is SharePoint lists provisioned within the underlying SharePoint site. This structure provides excellent performance and authentication and authorisation through the Microsoft 365 tenant, meaning that there is no additional user management other than what is already in place within Teams or SharePoint.
With the content being housed within your tenant and within SharePoint lists, we can easily report on that content using our Data Viewer. The Data Viewer is a tool designed for SharePoint and Teams that allows reports to be produced in Data Grid or Chart format on data sources such as SQL, Excel, SharePoint Lists, OData, and other Lightning Tools web parts using web part connections. Therefore, The Data Viewer is the ideal tool for reporting on Social Squared content and activity.
Below, you will see a dashboard containing multiple instances of the Data Viewer. The first instance (Unanswered Posts) is using the Data Viewer's Grid View. Along with a calculated column, the age of each post can be easily created. Conditional formatting is configured on the calculated column to highlight in Red all posts that have gone unanswered for 20 or more days. Posts that have gone unanswered for 10-20 days are displayed in amber, while the remaining posts are displayed in green. This report can provide a fast way to determine if subject matter experts are responding in a timely manner to questions from team members.
The second instance uses the Chart view to display the number of posts per month and the number of votes and likes each post received within those months. We’ll look into how this is configured later in this post.
The final instance of the Data Viewer displays the number of posts per forum within a Pie Chart view. The Data Viewer offers multiple types of Charts, including Pie, Donut, Bar, Line, Column, Area, Gauges, and TreeMap.
To configure the “Number of Topics, Likes and Votes” chart, you can configure the Data Viewer to select the SS_Posts list as a data source. If this list is not shown, there is an option to display hidden lists within the Data Viewer.
Once the list has been selected, you can choose the required columns. Note that Topicid, Answered, Votes, and Likes are selected.
On the Display Tab, you can group by the Created Date by Month, and then perform an aggregate function on the remaining columns such as Topicid, Votes, and Likes. Each of these can be formatted to choose from certain types of chart element such as Column, and area.
The Data Viewer is flexible, so you can design your charts and data grid in the way you would like them to be displayed. The entire page can then be displayed within SharePoint or Microsoft Teams.