More efficient merthod of checking variable definitions across report suites

[#1]

My company has been up and running with Omniture SiteCatalyst now for 2-3 months. Things are going well overall. There is one issue I've discovered that I think is probably very common across many Omniture clients, but particularly large clients. The issue is the ongoing documentation of how variables are being used across report suites.

My company now has roughly 40 report suites. One big part of the implementation task was to ensure that wherever variables are meant to be global, that they are in fact set up and coded in that way (which is meant to say, for example, that if eVar 1 is pagename, then that definition should be consistent across ALL report suites). On an ongoing basis, as new variables are used to meet new analytics requirements, we need to take a look across all report suites to see what is available. Also, we need to maintain records for a given report suite how each variable is defined.

The documentation of this data is currently done via SDRs, which don't work very well when you have more than a handful of report suites. In that case, you can build and maintain your own Exel sheet, which serves the purpose, but is tedious and time-consuming. What I would like to see is the abliity in the Admin Console to export via .csv an exhaustive list of all variables, whether used or unused (all 50 evars and sprops, all 80 events), for all report suites. With that, a pivot table could quickly be built to compile and see where inconsistencies exist.

Looking forward, I would like to see Adobe explore adding the abilty to categorize every variable as either 1) global or 2) customizable by report suite. With this in place, where the admin chooses to categorize a given variable as "global", it would no longer be customizable within any given report suite and the name given to it would be consistent across all report suites.

I think that building a solution for this problem would be "win-win" because it would save time for both Omniture/Adobe and it's clients. Also, the first part of the proposed solution (.csv export) seems to me to be relatively simple and not resource intensive to implement. I would appreciate everyone's support in voting for this proposal if this is a problem that you face and you think my proposed solution is a good one. Comments for improvements or criticisms welcome as well.

Thanks,

Aaron

[#2]

Aaron,

if you're a supported user you can request an Account Audit file which is showing you all enabled or disabled variables in one single sheet. This is a good way to compare the different settings across your account. It just does not show the name of the variable. But this can be easily accessed in the admin console in the report suite manager. Just select all suites and go to e.g. Events. It'll give you an overview about all events showing the state and name. If there are multiple values for the selected suites it'll give you a popup where you can see the values.

I'd suggest to define a range of global variables (e.g. prop1-40) and a customizable (e.g. prop41-50), this should be enforced for all admins creating new suites. Maintaining a single Excel sheet showing the global and customizable variables is a good idea.

I think introducing a parent-child relationship for settings would make it more complex as it already is. All it currently takes is a guideline for your admins.

Another way to make it easier is to create a template suite, configure everything as it should be globally and use this suite as the source for new suites. You can just ask ClientCare to copy over all settings and you're done.

That's just my personal opinion and experience from managing a bunch of suites. Looks like you should discuss global strategies with your Implementation Consultant.

Curious to hear your and others opinions.

//Andreas

[#3]

Regarding exporting report suite settings to Excel, this is already available. In the Admin Report Suites Manager, select all report suites, then click "Download". You will then download "Report Suites.tab", a tab-separated value file that contains the settings for every report suite. The output isn't elegant, but at least it solves your issue.

Regarding "global" vs "customizable" - sounds like a good idea!