SPACEWatch 5 Best Practice Guide

All the products in the SPACEWatch family are designed to let you search and analyze your storage to file level. Having discovered what you want, you can then share your results with others or carry out actions such as copying, deleting or moving unwanted files and folders.

The SPACEWatch products let you analyze your files at a high level – spotting trends or looking at what different users are doing. You can drill down from these high level views and see more and more detail.

How can you generate custom reports showing only the results you want, then share these with others?

There are three answers to this:

• Use results you have generated from your own search and analysis, or by opening a Virtual Folder*
• Directly generate a “built in” report
• Use or modify a Custom Report script**.

These approaches are linked, as shown in the picture below.


* Virtual Folders are available in SPACEWatch Enterprise, Domino and Exchange Editions v5.6.57 or later.
** Custom Report scripts are available in SPACEWatch Enterprise, Domino and Exchange Edition v5.7.65 or later.

Using your own results

The SPACEWatch family let you interactively search and analyze your space data. This means that you do not need to wait for a custom report to be generated before you get the information you want.

You can quickly analyze space data by user, file, folder, email attachment and in many other ways. You can view information at a high level for planning and investigation purposes e.g. looking at historic storage growth or trends in use by user or department. Or you can view it at a low level to clear up waste or identify misuse e.g. duplicates search, file search or file types summary.

Once you have found information that is important or relevant, how do you use it elsewhere?

You can use the results elsewhere either by sharing the results with other application or users, or by generating a custom report.

You can also save commonly used searches at this point, creating Virtual Folders to “store” the results for use later. Virtual Folders will always contain the correct results, even if you update your space database later.

Sharing results with other applications or users

All SPACEWatch products let you save your results in a variety of formats, allowing you to share this information with other applications or users. Supported formats include Microsoft Word and Excel, Adobe PDF, plain text – and even as a web page (complete with chart graphics as necessary).

Or alternatively you can copy and paste and chart or results list into another application such as Microsoft Excel.

Some SPACEWatch Pro tools include more sophisticated features – for example, the File Find tool lets you save your results split by space owner. In this way you can instantly save each owner’s results in individual files, ready for sharing.

Generating reports

You can quickly create custom reports, richly formatted and immediately presentable to others. To do this first generate the chart or results list you want in your report.

You can then choose the “Report” button and generate a custom report from this chart or results list. This report can then be printed out or saved in a variety of formats.

SPACEWatch Enterprise, Domino and Exchange Editions also let you email a custom report directly from within SPACEWatch Pro, automatically attaching the report in Adobe PDF format.

Built-in reports

The SPACEWatch family include a range of built-in analyses that allow “one click” access to popular analyses such as “largest files”, “unused files” etc.

In SPACEWatch Enterprise, Domino and Exchange Editions reports can be directly generated from these built-in analyses, and these can be scheduled for generation and distribution via email.

Where you have automated data collection (see Best Practice Guide “Data Collection”) you can use the same SPACEWatch Scheduler to create built-in report generation tasks. These tasks do not need to run on the same schedule as data collection tasks.

Scheduled reporting tasks can be created to automatically email results as PDF attachments. For example, one set of reports might go to storage administrators, another to the Help Desk.

Custom Report scripts

From v5.7.65 of SPACEWatch Enterprise, Domino and Exchange Editions you can use or modify custom report scripts provided with the application. These are in the "Custom Reports" folder in "My Documents\SPACEWatch".

Custom Report scripts are XML text documents that can be edited with Notepad. Just about any report requirement can be met with these scripts - the examples provided show various approaches that you can use. You can automate scripts using SPACEWatch Task Manager; pass arguments to them e.g. to limit the parts of your space database they use; automatically save and optionally email the results in a variety of formats.

For more information refer to the SPACEWatch product help. If you would like special custom report scripts created for you Sharpeware can carry this out relatively quickly - contact sales@sharpeware.com for more details.

Getting more help

If you have any questions about how to generate or distribute custom reports please contact your sales representative, or email sales@sharpeware.com.