Hey all!
I'm fairly new to SharePoint administration... Up until this point, I've been mostly a front-end guy (custom lists, dashboards, all that jazz) and while I've had occasion to go into Central Admin or even to the servers in SharePoint installations I've supported, I'm not really a full on server admin. In my new job, I'm part of a small team, and am being challenged to learn a lot about back-end support in a fairly short time frame.
I've been asked to enable item level auditing on one of our site collections (to track who is making permissions changes), and yesterday I enabled it. When I ran the audit report, however, I noticed that I was able to see log data going back months, presumably to the creation of the site collection. I don't understand how this can be: I only enabled auditing of permissions, but I can see log data for whatever I want: documents, item editing, you name it.
My question is, how can this be? Is there something in Central Admin that audits the web application automatically? I have confirmed that no content types are being audited specifically on the site collection, and am a bit stumped as to how I can be getting audit data for things that I'm not consciously attempting to track.
Thanks for your time, and sorry if this is too much of a newbie question.