Is SharePoint Auditing something separately licensed?

Question

I am trying to get a solution for an internal company request. We have a set of reports that are used throughout the company, and we want to track who/when(maybe where) downloaded one of these Excel based reports from a SharePoint Library page.

We have been given push-back from the SharePoint Admin team, saying that turning on Auditing would cost too much in extra licensing to be allowed.

Is this really a separate module or piece of software that would have to be paid for? I have read many sites, and questions on Stack Exchange as well, laying out the process for setting up an Audit log, I just don't have the admin level privileges.

Thanks in advance for pointing me in the correct direction.

Answer 1

You are correct, and they are correct. There are both paid and free versions of Auditing in SharePoint 2010.

• Auditing, as it ships with both the free and paid versions of SharePoint, is deeply flawed. There are many situations that are not audited at all or incorrectly audited.
• The audit data is stored in a very cryptic way. Even using the reporting facilities that come with the 'paid for' versions of SharePoint, the information is difficult to interpret. Also reports time out / cause errors more often than not.

From the accepted answer on How do we activate auditing in SharePoint Foundation 2010.

So yes, you can have Auditing in Foundation, Standard and Enterprise - but the result you're after may not be there. But you should most definitely try the free version at first to see what you get.

But if you can't audit on out-of-the-box things, then your say-no team needs to be convinced on why you need a third party tool for auditing.

Answer 2

Depends what you paid for. It is not licensed separately, but there are different versions of Sharepoint and you likely have one without the enterprise features. And yes, there is a significant price difference.