Passive and active methods are not mutually exclusive — they are two halves of a whole — and should be used to compliment one another.

Passive Methods

Passive methods allow you to gather hard facts — statistics about who is accessing what types of information and when — without needing to actively involve the end-user community. At the risk of sounding a little too Bogart-esque, I sometimes like to use the term "shadowing your users" because that's precisely what you're doing; you're gathering valuable data about your users' online activity on the intranet without their knowledge.

This is not a covert activity that needs to be done under the cover of darkness with your night-vision goggles and frogman suit. It's standard practice that should be performed on a regular basis by every intranet owner with a large user-base. After all, not all users have the time to send you their feedback.

Web server software such as Microsoft's IIS and Apache's HTTP Server maintain logs of who is accessing the various resources on the site. Although the format of these logs may vary, most log entries contain basic information about site access: the host name or IP address of the requester, the user name (if log-on credentials are required), the date and time of the request, the resource being requested, the return code and the size of the resource. Below is an example of the CLF (common log file) format:

remote.hostname.net - - [31/Mar/2003:22:31:16 -0800]
"GET /Products/Software/index.html HTTP/1.0" 200 97

There's only so much you can do with thousands upon thousands of these log entries, however, because it's raw data without any added-value. You need to be able to quickly process this data into something readable to the average intranet owner. The good news is that you don't have to worry about trying to make sense out of all these log files. There are hundreds of Web site analysis tools that can do the job for you and they come in all shapes and sizes, from commercial and shareware to freeware and open source. A list of many of these tools can be found at Google's Web directory.

Web log analysis tools allow you to compile raw log files and generate detailed, value-added, and reader-friendly reports. Although it depends on the particular software's functionality, at the very least it should provide you with both numerical and graphical representations of site usage. Reports can be generated to show hourly, daily, weekly, monthly hits; statistics for individual users and which pages they have accessed in a given period; which pages have been accessed the most; and bandwidth usage — just to name a few.

WebTrends log analysis tool showing example of a graphical report (Click image for high-resolution image).