Announcing the General Availability of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs

General Availability of Microsoft Graph reporting APIs for retrieving Office 365 product usage data

The usage reports in the Office 365 admin center enable admins to understand their company’s usage across the Office 365 services. However, many of you have existing reporting solutions such as a company reporting application or a web portal in place. To assure that you can monitor your IT services in one unified location, the usage reporting APIs complement the usage reports and allow organizations and independent software vendors to incorporate Office 365 usage data into their existing reporting solutions. Using these APIs, you can retrieve the data available in all of the usage reports, including organization level summaries per service, entity level (user, sites, accounts) usage information for reporting periods of the last 7/30/90/180 days, and daily activity aggregates.

Get started with the new APIs

The new APIs are available now, and any user with global admin, product admin rights (for Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint), or a reports reader role can retrieve data through these APIs.

You can leverage the Microsoft Graph documentation for the reporting API and submit feature requests by asking or voting on an idea on UserVoice. Please submit questions by posting them on Stack Overflow and tagging microsoftgraph.

With this announcement, we are announcing the deprecation of the following APIs within the Office 365 Reporting Web Service: ConnectionbyClientType, ConnectionbyClientTypeDetail, CsActiveUser, CsAVConferenceTime, CsP2PAVTime, CsConference, CsP2PSession, GroupActivity, MailboxActivity, GroupActivity, MailboxUsage, MailboxUsageDetail, StaleMailbox and StaleMailboxDetail.

We will remove these APIs, as well as any related PowerShell cmdlets, on January 29, 2018.

If you are currently using APIs or any of the related PowerShell cmdlets from the Office 365 Reporting Web Service, please start planning the migration of any subsystems within your organization.

Below is a summary of the APIs and cmdlets that will be deprecated.

Data protection beyond backup and recovery with Office 365

Protecting your data against file corruption , data loss, and malicious intent is a top priority for Microsoft, and an integral part of the Office 365 service. Our approach to data protection goes beyond high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. Resiliency and recoverability are built into the service.

Even if a traditional backup solution provides recovery options to address file corruption, deletion, and malicious attacks, it won’t necessarily help you recover quickly from such incidents. Research shows that it can take months to detect the presence of an attacker an organization’s network. Given this, a backup and restore solution could be a potential area of attack, and could further broaden the scope of attack into your disaster recovery environment. Additionally, all backup data would need to be throuroughly cleansed before it could be leveraged as a viable restore option. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 30% of organizations targeted by major cyberattacks will spend more than two months cleansing backup systems and data, resulting in delayed recoveries.[i]

With this in mind, Office 365 has moved beyond the backup and restore solutions that were first established in on-premises environments. Microsoft invests deeply in providing a holistic in-place solution that both keeps multiple copies of your data across multiple locations, and enables you to develop upfront policies for prevention and detection. These policies can be enforced manually and automatically at multiple levels of granularity, including via intelligent location-based classification, patterns, or sensitive types of content.

In addition to the inherent versioning and recycling capabilities provided by applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive, Office 365 provides comprehensive solutions to help keep your data safe from both human error as well as malicious attacks:

• Data Loss Prevention helps customers to identify, monitor and protect sensitive data through deep content analysis.
• Exchange Online Protection provides robust email protection against spam, known viruses and malware.
• Advanced Threat Protection extends Exchange Online Protection by safeguarding your Office 365 environment (email, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams) from today’s most sophisticated unknown threats leveraging behavioral analysis and machine learning techniques to mitigate malicious content. ATP also provides real time, time-of-click protection against malicious URLs, and rich reporting and tracking capabilities, so you can gain critical insights into who is being targeted in your organization and the category, volume, and frequency of attacks you are facing.
• Threat Intelligence provides interactive tools to analyze prevalence and severity of threats in near real-time, real-time and customizable threat alert notifications, and remediation capabilities for suspicious content.
• Auditing helps monitor and investigate actions taken on your data, intelligently identify risks, contain and respond to threats, and protect valuable intellectual property.
• Advanced Data Governance provides smart policy recommendations and automatic data classifications that allow you to take actions on data- such as retention and deletion -throughout its lifecycle. Built-in and custom alerts help you identify data governance risks like unusual volumes of file deletion.

The multiple built-in security capabilities of Office 365 in combination with the above services and controls help ensure your data is protected in-place and incidents like file corruption, deletion, and malicious intent are minimized at all times.

More information:

• Data Protection on the Microsoft Trust Center
• Data Resiliency in Microsoft Office 365
• Overview of retention policies

[i] From Gartner Foundational Research: Prepare for and Respond to a Business Disruption After an Aggressive Cyberattack, ID: G00275607

Customizing Office 365 ProPlus using the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run

Today we are announcing a preview of the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run, a simple to use web application that enables desktop administrators to customize Office 365 clients.

Until today, Windows desktop administrators would use notepad or an equivalent text editor to compile various XML statements to define the Office edition, feature update frequency, version, language and other number of available settings. This somewhat tedious task, in most cases, would result in installation errors from fouled up manual entries or copy-and-paste actions into the text editor.

With the new Office Customization Tool, desktop admins can leverage the rich user interface that intuitively shows all available options to build the desired Office configurations. The configuration tool groups the commonly used settings in the following categories:

• software & language
• installation & update
• licensing & display

Each of these areas provide admins with options to help meet their security and regulatory needs.

One of our favorite additions, is the configuration builder. Desktop admins can quickly see a list of all configuration settings being chosen on the right-hand side of the screen, giving the desktop admin a quick and easy way to see the result of their selections without jumping through multiple screens.

When all the desired settings have been selected, desktop admins are provided with the option to download the resulting configuration.xml file which is to be used in conjunction with the Office Deployment Tool for the settings to take affect during installation time of the Office 365 client.

Desktop Admin also have an option to upload any previously configured XML files to the configuration tool and modify them with new or existing settings.

For those of you who are familiar with the old Win32 Office Customization Tool which came with your perpetual (MS Installer) bits, you’ll notice the new customization tool has a lack of install-time user preferences. Over the next several months we will be enhancing the tool to enable desktop admins to select many configurable user preferences that are currently being offered with the perpetual counterpart. We encourage you to try out the new Office Customization Tool which is available in preview today, by clicking on the link or typing http://config.office.com in your browser. Send us feedback and let us know what you think by using the send a smile feature, located on the top right of the web application.

Amesh Mansukhani

Senior Program Manager – Office Engineering

Rethinking the modern workplace with Microsoft 365

Today’s post was written by Catherine Boeger, general manager for Microsoft Office marketing

Today the rapid pace of change is challenging businesses and government organizations to rethink everything we do. What’s changing? For the first time ever, we have five generations in the workforce, from Baby Boomers to Generation Z, all with different ideas about how work gets done and different levels of comfort and expectations around technology. Constantly changing customer and citizen expectations are pushing businesses to innovate quickly and find new ways to leverage information from both inside and outside organizations. And ever-growing cyber security threats remind us we must remain vigilant in protecting our employees and customer data and in maintaining regulatory and industry compliance. One of the primary questions is, how can you embrace these modern workplace trends to help drive business growth? I want to share some of the ways Microsoft 365, which brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Security + Mobility, can help organizations like yours leverage digital transformation to enable people to come together in a secure way and get the best results from each other to drive business forward.

Let’s first look at the generational shift in the workplace. With five generations of workers on the payroll, how can you create a connected environment to leverage that diversity, which can be so critical for your success? At Microsoft, we’ve found that teamwork is key—bringing together groups of people, no matter their generation, function, or location, to address problems and opportunities with a shared sense of accountability to complete the task in front of them. That’s why we built Microsoft Teams in Microsoft 365: to help you create a digital hub for teamwork where everyone can easily share or access information they need and focus on a common goal. Powerful features like threaded persistent chats and access to recorded meetings can help create an ongoing dialog and enable people to learn from each other and get caught up quickly. And while we all may have a habit of thinking that mobility is more important to Millennials or younger generations, really the need and desire to be productive from anywhere has become a reality of all our lives, which is why Teams is accessible from almost any device.

Generational diversity isn’t the only gap we can bridge to help drive business growth. We’re building tools for the modern workplace that close longstanding technology gaps that separate employees from data, resources and expertise they need to do their best work. We believe a truly modern workplace can empower everyone in the organization to turn ideas into action – from the executive team to the Firstline Workforce.

Firstline Workers are often the first to engage customers, the first to represent a company’s brand and first to see products and services in action. They are the people behind the counter, on the phone, in the clinics, on shop floor and in the field. Their unique perspective provides the on-the-ground facts that help organizations spot trends, challenges and best practices. We see organizations take advantage of this firstline perspective every day to unlock innovation and growth. I’m reminded of a Microsoft customer, Fruit of the Loom, who recognized that “their greatest thinkers are within the company,” according to their Chief Operating Officer, Tony Pelaski.  Fruit of the Loom is using Microsoft 365 Enterprise to connect the entire organization and foster an engaged workforce with the capabilities and tools to deliver against customer insights, market trends, and new ideas. Customer stories like these inspired us to create a version of Microsoft 365 specifically for your Firstline Workforce. We know that all organizations have critical data, and I believe it will be those that take advantage of their firstline data and empower all workers that will achieve a true and sustainable competitive advantage.

Of course, any data you collect must be secured. Today we all face constant pressure to have open flows of information to drive productivity and teamwork, and it’s as critical as ever to protect our organizations because threats today are complex and target everyone. Cyber threats have grown so pervasive that 74 percent of organizations expect to be hacked in the next year.[1] That’s why Microsoft built security into all layers of Microsoft 365, powered by the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph, to help you detect threats and protect your people, data, and devices without disrupting employee productivity. Customers like the UK Ministry of Defence have felt confident in shifting to the Microsoft cloud because capabilities like Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection and Customer Lockbox help provide the security and privacy controls they need to protect sensitive data.

And on top of security, we all worry about how best to maintain compliance and data privacy, because no doing so can stop any organization—no matter how innovative—in its tracks. Microsoft works closely with regulators and customers to ensure that our services are compliant with global, regional, and industry regulations. Microsoft 365 provides advanced compliance functionality to help adhere to these regulations, including General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR. Microsoft 365 is ready for May 25, 2018 – the day when GDPR takes effect, and can help you accelerate your compliance journey.

As a keynote speaker at the upcoming Microsoft Tech Summit Toronto December 13 and 14, I’ll be talking in depth about how Microsoft 365 can help you create a modern workplace that brings people together in secure ways to innovate new products and services. I hope you’ll join me and Arpan Shah, general manager of Azure Infrastructure marketing at Microsoft, to discover the latest trends, tools, and product roadmaps designed to help you thrive in a new world of work.

[1] http://www.isaca.org/cyber/Documents/State-of-Cybersecurity-infographic.pdf

Office Online Server November 2017 Release

The Office Online team is pleased to release our latest update to Office Online Server (OOS). OOS empowers organizations to view, edit, and create documents in the browser with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote from their own datacenter. Please verify that you have the latest version of the OOS release to ensure the best experience.

The November 2017 update of OOS includes the following improvements:

• Improved booting performance in PowerPoint Online editing scenarios
• Enhanced transitions in PowerPoint Online
• Improved Find functionality in Excel Online
• Document format conversion from xls to xlsx supported in Excel Online
• Emoji support in Word Online
• Increased table capabilities in Word Online
• Insert image from host in Word Online
• Doubled the time limit for audio recordings in OneNote Online
• Accessibility & usability improvements across all applications
• Many more improvements + bug fixes across all applications

How do I get OOS/download the update?

We encourage OOS customers to download the November 2017 release, as only the latest version will be supported with bug fixes and security patches available from the Microsoft Updates Download Center. You must uninstall the previous version of OOS to install this release.

With the exception of those who have access through the Open Program, Volume Licensing customers with a Volume Licensing account can download at no cost and will have view-only functionality which includes PowerPoint sharing in Skype for Business. Customers that require document creation, edit and save functionality in OOS need to have an on-premises Office Suite license with Software Assurance or an Office 365 ProPlus subscription. To download the latest update of OOS, please proceed to the Volume License Servicing Center. Office Online Server is a component of Office; therefore, it will be shown under each of the Office product pages including Office Standard 2016, Office Professional Plus 2016, and Office 2016 for Mac Standard. For more information on licensing requirements, please refer to our product terms.

For customers whose licenses qualify for OOS, but cannot obtain OOS through the Volume Licensing Services Center, the following actions are possible:

• VL Open customers can contact their Support Center.
• Direct customers can submit a request from their Office 365 admin center or contact support.

Part 4: Promote Microsoft 365 awareness and enable end users with training

This blog series is written by Cyril Belikoff, Senior Director of Office Marketing

This is the fourth and final post from our blog series on the four success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption.

Part 1: Enable your business stakeholders with a successful Microsoft 365 adoption

Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption

Part 3: Identify business needs and prioritize Microsoft 365 scenarios

In this blog post I will focus on the last two success factors – Awareness and Training, outlining best practices and available resources.

Utilizing a combination of internal communication campaigns and training to promote awareness and ensure end user readiness is crucial in overcoming the typical apathy that awaits new technology rollouts. Awareness and training really do have a big impact. According to research, high usage Office 365 customers were more likely to have implemented awareness and training activities as part of their adoption plan when compared to customers with lower usage.

Setting the stage for effective awareness and training

We are all too familiar with how hard it is to get people to change. Let’s face it, most people approach change from a selfish perspective. Therefore, it’s important your communication and training efforts are positioned in the context of what your end users care about most – what’s in it for them. Also, your training must go beyond the procedural “how-to” information for performing tasks with Microsoft 365. Let your end users know why the change is happening and what’s in it for them. An effective way of doing this is to tailor your communications and training around the scenarios you identified and prioritized earlier in your planning efforts.  

Like any change, it’s important to reinforce it to ensure end users sustain their adoption of Microsoft 365 and the new culture of work it brings. Don’t think of your awareness and training execution as a one-time event, rather it should cover pre-launch, launch, and post-launch.

Create internal awareness and excitement

To drive sustained adoption, users must be aware of and excited for Microsoft 365.  This means doing internal communications to promote Office 365 and engagement events. Use the resources we’ve made available, including email, poster, and tips and tricks templates you can customize for your rollout. Have a senior leader in the business be the face of your awareness campaign to validate the importance of the organization adopting Microsoft 365 and getting everyone onboard.

Enable end users to be successful with Microsoft 365

Given the diversity of people in any organization you’ll likely have multiple audiences to serve with your training program. In preparing your plan it’s important to consider:

• What are the different user types in your organization? What is their comfort level with new technology?
• What is their role in the organization? What are some of the tasks they perform?
• Where do users perform these tasks? On a mobile device? In the office using a workstation?
• How might organizational policies be affected by the integration of the new tool set – e.g., sharing documents, storing files, collaborating with external partners, using email attachments?

Training end users should take on multiple forms to accommodate different learning styles, geographical barriers, and any constraints you face. To get started with your training, take advantage of the available resources from Microsoft, including the Office Training Center and Windows 10 Quick Start Guides. Use your champions to help supplement your training plan, they are very effective at helping ready your end users.

Next steps

Now that we’ve reviewed all four of the success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption – Stakeholders, Scenarios, Awareness and Training – your question may be what’s next? It’s time to start planning how you are going to ensure these success factors are in place for your adoption. I’d suggest getting your stakeholders and project team members onboard. Work with Microsoft FastTrack, our customer success service, and a Microsoft partner to build your Success Plan and get further guidance and resources to help you implement these four success factors.

Reach out to us and your peers who are also on this journey by checking out the Drive Adoption community. We look forward to hearing about your Microsoft 365 success story!

Part 3: Identify business needs and prioritize Microsoft 365 scenarios

This blog series is written by Cyril Belikoff, Senior Director of Office Marketing

This is the third post from our blog series on the four success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption.

Check out the other posts part of this series:

Part 1: Enable your business stakeholders with a successful Microsoft 365 adoption
Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption

In this blog post I will focus on the second success factor – Scenarios, and how to identify and prioritize them, while measuring their impact on your organization.

The true measure of success for your Microsoft 365 adoption, like any change or new technology, will be the value realized by your organization from its investment. Your opportunity with Microsoft 365 is to enable the different Lines of Business (LoBs) and departments in your organization to realize important business outcomes. This requires identifying and prioritizing scenarios – which are the different ways people and teams in your organization can use the capabilities of Microsoft 365 to achieve their goals.

Get started with early wins and build on that success

Our most successful customers typically start their journey with more basic scenarios that have universal appeal across the organization:

• Employee Engagement & Communication: Create a sustainable, consistent way for senior leaders to connect with employees, using Yammer as a community to share and engage, and Skype Meeting Broadcast for companywide meetings.
• Bring Campaigns to Market Faster: Enable marketers to collaborate with people inside and outside the organization using Microsoft Teams as their shared workspace for communicating and sharing with team members.
• Increase Sales Productivity and Grow Revenue: Provide sales teams with a centralized hub with Microsoft Teams for sales planning, real time collaboration on proposals and RFPs, and for managing their monthly, quarterly, and annual business reviews.
• Streamline Business Reviews: Help finance move beyond gathering and cleaning data to be able to analyze data with Power BI, and collaborate together on the data in one place with Microsoft Teams.

Once you’ve delivered value with these more basic scenarios, you have more credibility to engage your business stakeholders for custom scenarios that deliver unique value. Think of this value realization motion as a flywheel – score some early wins with cross organization scenarios, and then move on to more ambitious areas of impact for each LoB or department. As you provide more and more impact to the business, more stakeholders will get engaged and the momentum of the flywheel builds and builds.

So, how can you work with your business stakeholders to identify relevant scenarios for their teams to adopt? At it’s most basic level it’s about identifying what the team wants to accomplish, how they can use the technology to accomplish their goal, and what the expected impact of the Scenario is. To help you get started, check out the Microsoft 365 productivity library, where you can discover new scenarios based on your industry and different functional departments.

The IT team leading the Microsoft 365 adoption at Standard Bank – Africa’s largest banking group, has done a great job engaging with the business to identify scenarios that are helping different stakeholders accomplish their goals. Standard Bank dedicated an adoption team within IT to engage with each business unit and functional department to realize unique value with Microsoft 365 in a consistent manner – i) conduct an “art of the possible” session with the team so they can start to envision relevant Microsoft 365 scenarios, ii) workshop scenarios by mapping Microsoft 365 capabilities to the team’s challenges and goals, iii) prototyping and implementing prioritized scenarios, and iv) enabling the business unit to be self-sustainable in their adoption of scenarios and evolving the solutions to suit their needs.

“You don’t need a large team and budget to get going. Dedicate some resources who are passionate about improving the business, who can get in where the work is happening and can assist business users in making the bridge between their day to day challenges and friction points, and the enabling technology that comes with Microsoft 365.

A great resource to help with this is the Microsoft 365 Productivity Library, we’ve used it to help our business discover scenarios and use cases that are relevant to them. Once they see that they can bring different components of the suite together to respond to different needs, they get it.”

Ian Doyle
Standard Bank, IT Executive

To avoid overwhelming end users with too many scenarios at the same time it’s important to prioritize your scenarios based on expected impact and difficulty of implementing. This prioritized list will determine what scenarios get rolled out when.

Measure and share success

To measure the success of your Microsoft 365 rollout, it’s critical to develop a set of criteria to evaluate the different scenarios you and your team have implemented. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you expect will improve based on adopting your scenarios. Evaluate where you are before implementing Microsoft 365 and measure your ongoing progress post implementation. While it’s important to measure and showcase the business value you are providing the organization with your Microsoft 365 implementation, monitoring and reporting on usage helps demonstrate overall adoption levels and areas where improvement is required. The Office 365 adoption content pack is available to gain insights on how your organization is adopting the various services within Office 365.

Success stories are often just as valuable as quantitative measures when demonstrating Microsoft 365 success. Encourage your project team members and champions to identify examples of people and teams using Microsoft 365 to accomplish their goals and everyday tasks. Make sure you share these success stories through Yammer or other internal channels.

Now that you have identified and prioritized your scenarios, it’s time to create internal excitement about the scenarios and ready end users to successfully adopt them. Stay tuned for the next blog post where I will cover the final two success factors for driving Microsoft 365 adoption – Awareness and Training.

Part 2: Recruit key stakeholders to help with your adoption

This blog series is written by Cyril Belikoff, Senior Director of Office Marketing

This is the second post from our blog series on how to help your organization accelerate time to value with its Microsoft 365 adoption.

In the initial blog post in this series, I shared our viewpoint on the opportunity Information Technology (IT) teams have with solutions, such as Microsoft 365, to enable business value for their organization and I outlined the four success factors for adopting Microsoft 365. 

This blog post will focus on the first success factor – Stakeholders, and their importance in driving the change necessary to realize the full value of Microsoft 365.

Your Microsoft 365 rollout is not just about implementing new technologies, rather it’s part of a broader transformation to achieve the business outcomes that matter most to your organization. For example, many of our customers adopt Microsoft 365 to enable a new culture of work that empowers their employees to be creative and work together, securely. Transforming to this new culture of work requires buy-in from across the organization. There are two stakeholder groups whose participation is critical to getting this buy-in:

• Executive sponsors whose influence can help drive the change required for your organization to achieve its business goals with Microsoft 365

• Champions whose passion for this new way of working will help bring their colleagues along

Executive sponsors

Like any other organizational transformation – enabling a new culture of work by adopting Microsoft 365 requires executive sponsorship. According to a McKinsey & Company survey, transformation projects are more successful when there is a visible executive sponsor.  

Executive sponsors play three important roles in your organization’s Microsoft 365 adoption:

• Help articulate the business priorities and envision how Microsoft 365 can be used to solve different business problems
• Lead the transformation and communicate the business benefits to other leaders across the organization
• Actively participate and use the technology to help drive adoption across end users and reinforce desired behaviors.

Champions

Finding passionate end users, who believe that technology can change the way we work to be Microsoft 365 champions, is a great way to scale your adoption efforts. Microsoft 365 champions are your power users and an extension of you and your team, evangelizing to their colleagues how Microsoft 365 can be used to help them in everyday tasks.  

There are many ways champions can help their colleagues adopt Microsoft 365, such as running lunch and learn sessions with their team, using Microsoft 365 apps and services for the different collaboration scenarios their team engages in, and welcoming new users to Microsoft 365. It’s important to communicate internally that champions are not IT help desk, rather they are business representatives who can help their team members work in new ways with Microsoft 365.

To build a successful champions community as part of your Microsoft 365 adoption consider the following:

• Recruit champions who are excited about technology and new ways of working, and who are eager to share and help their colleagues
• Ready and support your champions through lightweight Microsoft 365 training and a Yammer group to connect the community to support and encourage each other
• Enable the champions by sharing materials they can reuse in their engagement with colleagues
• Recognize the efforts of your champions

Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management, and development consultancy, implemented a successful Office 365 champions community. As part of their program, they paired area of practice senior leaders with Office 365 champions. The result was champions learn more about how the business works and senior leaders learn about the technology and how it can be used in their practice area. Also, the mentorship opportunity with a senior leader in the business worked as a great champion recruiting tool. Learn more champion tips and tricks directly from Mott MacDonald in this short video clip.

Help your champions be successful in their role by encouraging them to join our champions program. They will gain access to the latest news and tips, champion-peer networking and sharing, partnerships with Microsoft at premier events and meetups in your industry, and access to Microsoft subject matter experts and unique Office 365 training and content.

Gaining buy-in and participation from key stakeholders, such as executive sponsors and champions, requires educating them about how Microsoft 365 can be used to achieve their goals. In the next blog I will share more about how to work with your business stakeholders to identify and prioritize the Microsoft 365 scenarios that are most relevant to their teams.