After migrating to Office 365, the role of IT is more critical than ever. By driving usage of the services, IT can transform how their organization communicates, collaborates and creatively solves problems, enabling a truly modern workplace. As advocates of technology, IT admins play a crucial role in enabling their people with the best tools to not only improve productivity, but also to accelerate business outcomes.

One of the keys to achieve this goal is to ensure admins understand how every person is using the services in Office 365 so that they can prioritize their efforts, drive targeted end user training and measure the success of their adoption campaigns.

In Office 365, admins have access to a suite of usage reporting tools – including the reporting dashboard in the admin center with 18 reports and Usage Analytics in PowerBI – that enable them to get a deep understanding of how their organization is using Office 365.

Today, we’re introducing a wealth of new usage reporting capabilities that help organizations drive end user adoption.

 

Track usage of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork and has become a crucial tool for millions of people. We’re adding two new usage reports to the admin center so you can understand how your users are leveraging this powerful tool.

The Microsoft Teams user activity report gives you a view of the most common activities that your users perform in Microsoft Teams – including how many people engage in team chat, how many communicate via private chat message, and how many participate in calls or meetings. You can see this information both at the tenant level, as well as for each individual user.
The Microsoft Teams app usage report provides you with information about how your users connect to Microsoft Teams, including mobile apps. The report helps admins understand what devices are popular in their organization and how many users work on the go.

We’re also added a new card for Microsoft Teams to the reporting dashboard. The tile gives you an overview of the activity in Microsoft Teams – including the number of active users – so that you can quickly understand how many users are using Microsoft Teams.

Both reports will roll out to customers worldwide in November.

Understand how your organization uses Microsoft Teams

 

Easily provide access to usage insights

In many organizations, the task to drive usage and adoption of Office 365 is shared by the IT department and non-IT staff such as training managers who do not have access to the admin center. Providing these business stakeholders with access to the usage insights is crucial in enabling them to successfully drive and track adoption.

With this need in mind, we’re introducing a new reports reader role that you can now assign to any user in the Office 365 admin center. This capability will roll out to customers worldwide this week.

This role provides access to the usage reporting dashboard in the admin center, the adoption content pack in PowerBI as well as the data returned by the Microsoft Graph reporting API. In the admin center, a reports reader will be able to access areas relevant to usage and adoption only – for example, a user with this role cannot configure settings or access the product specific admin centers. The reports reader role UI is not available yet in Azure Active Directory but will come soon.

A reports reader will see a reduced homepage and navigation menu

 

Visualize and analyze usage in PowerBI with Office 365 Usage Analytics

Office 365 Usage Analytics – currently available as preview as Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in PowerBI – combines the intelligence of the usage reports with the interactive analysis capabilities of Power BI, providing a wealth of usage and adoption insights. 
At the beginning of 2018, the content pack will be renamed to Usage Analytics and will reach general availability with an updated version that will include new metrics on teamwork and collaboration, usage data for Microsoft Teams, Yammer Groups and Office 365 Groups, and more.

Visualize and analyze usage with Office 365 Usage Analytics in PowerBI

 

A new “Social Collaboration” area will provide you insights about how people work in teams, and especially how they leverage Microsoft Teams to do so.

All SharePoint reports will be enhanced with activity information from all site types (in addition to groups and team sites) and additional site activity information (page views: number of pages viewed in a site and number of unique pages visited in a site).

Analyze usage of Microsoft Teams with Office 365 Usage Analytics

 

Microsoft Graph Reporting APIs reach general availability

The Microsoft Graph reporting APIs enable customers to access the data provided in the Office 365 usage reports. To assure that you can monitor your IT services in one unified place, the APIs complement the existing usage reports by allowing organizations and independent software vendors to incorporate the Office 365 activity data into their existing reporting solutions.

In October, the reporting APIs will reach general availability service. 

In November, the currently available Office 365 reporting web services will be retired and will not be supported anymore. Please see the full list of deprecated APIs.

We will also be providing a new beta endpoint that will return json data object with full ODATA support. The new endpoint will be fully integrated into the Microsoft Graph SDK. Learn more

 

 

More to come

In the coming months, we will continue to further improve the Office 365 usage reporting experience to provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365.  We’re currently working on the following concepts:

 

Usage Score – Insights by Scenario and Maturity Level

Office 365 is a suite of products providing a variety of services that together enable modern workplace scenarios such as real-time co-authoring, real-time group chat or working from anywhere. People get the most value out of Office 365 when they take advantage of the full set of capabilities of the service.

In the new modern workplace, we have seen IT concentrating heavily on how to help users use technology effectively for desired business outcomes. To enable IT organizations to better understand the value that Office 365 is providing to their users, we’re introducing Usage Score:

 

Insights by Scenario and Maturity Level – Usage Score analyzes how well your organization is using the various Office 365 service and provides you with usage insights for scenarios such as document collaboration, team work, meetings, mobility, and data protection. For each scenario, you will receive a score that determines your maturity level enabling you to quickly understand where your organization is on their digital transformation journey. Detailed information will help you understand how your organization could leverage Office 365 even better to accomplish your goals.

Usage Score – Usage insights by scenario

 

Recommendations to take action – To help you maximize the value you’re getting out of Office 365, Usage Score provides you with personalized and contextual recommendations on how to improve your score – such as changing a configuration setting or starting a targeted adoption campaign. In addition, Usage Score will make it easy for you to take targeted action. If the recommendation is to drive an adoption campaign via email, you will be able to access email templates and launch a targeted email campaign to the right users directly from the admin center.

Usage Score will become available in 2018.

Easily take action to improve your score

 

Advanced Usage Analytics

Advanced Usage Analytics enables you to access more granular usage data enabling your organization to perform advanced analytics on your organization’s Office 365 usage data.

• Leverage a scalable and extensible solution template to transmit the Office 365 usage dataset into your Azure datastore
• Dynamically join usage data with complete user metadata from Azure Active Directory
• Bring your own user metadata – i.e. as a csv file – to enrich the dataset with your organization’s context or any other LOB data
• Stand up an end-to-end solution in minutes including data extraction, Azure SQL, Azure Analysis Services (optional), and Power BI reports
• Access usage data at the granularity of your choice such as daily, weekly, or monthly.

 

Putting the reports in action

The Microsoft 365 user adoption guide provides you a plan to leverage the Office 365 usage repots to meet your goal of driving end user adoption. This guidance is available as part of Microsoft FastTrack customer success service to help you realize value faster. FastTrack can help get started or extend your use of your services, including helping you with adoption planning resources and services.

 

Let us know what you think!

Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower right corner in the admin center. We’d also love to hear your feedback on the new concept that we’re working on! Please leaves us a comment on this blog post to let us know what you think.

We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure the Office 365 reporting experience meets your needs.

 

– Anne Michels, @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team