What does the 'SharePoint Viewers' site feature do?

Iron Contributor

I'm helping a colleague build a site and they have been looking into the site usage capabilities in SharePoint Online. One of the things they'd like to monitor is the names of users who are accessing their site and its content.

 

My colleague found a Microsoft article which says the following. However, there doesn't appear to be any detail behind what this does to the site.

 

For a more granular view on who accessed which file, as the article states please activate “SharePoint Viewers” setting from Site Features.

“To view the names of the individuals who have accessed your site, your SharePoint administrator will need to activate the SharePoint Viewers setting.”

 

I haven't come across this feature before, so I went ahead and activated it on the site.

 

Viewers.png

 

I can't seem to find anything that has changed, the site usage section appears to remain the same. Does anybody know how this works?

 

Thanks

4 Replies

@Toby McDaid I ran into this same issue and it seems like the feature has some issues with it. It worked for me at the beginning of the month but now it stopped. I have attached an example below.

 

Viewers Feature.png

 

@Toby McDaid, here's a support article for the viewers feature.  It had to be temporarily disabled in mid-February for a week, but is now 100% available.  Hope that helps!

 

@Graham Kent Thanks for the update.

 

When I go look at viewers for a file, it only shows me the first window pane worth of viewers. For example, it might have had 30 people look at the file, but I can only see the top 10 or so. I can't scroll down to see the rest of them. Has anyone figured out a way to see all of the viewers, not just the latest batch?

any luck exporting the data?