Microsoft has announced a new reporting portal, which will help in providing valuable insights about usage and details of the Office 365 service directly in the new Office 365 admin center, and it’s available now.
“When we started the process of revamping reports in Office 365 about a year ago, it was extremely important for us to include customer feedback into the development process from the very beginning. The first version of the new reporting portal includes a new activity dashboard and a variety of new reports that provide consistent insights across all Office 365 services with a highly improved user experience.”
The centerpiece of the new reporting is a cross-service portal, which provides more visibility into your organization’s use of Office 365, hence making it easier for you to make decisions or report back to management. The graphs will provide you with visualized key data allowing you to quickly comprehend the information. You will also be able to see the number of users who have used each workload, along with the key summary of the activity taking place within the product. You will also be able to pivot the reports to different reporting periods (7, 30, 60 and 90 days) to identify trends.
Image Source: blogs.office.com
The company states,
“When using Office 365, organizations want to have a clear understanding of the return on their investment. Especially during the rollout process, Office 365 admins often have to provide reports on a weekly or even daily basis showing how users are adopting it. The new reporting portal gives you a quick way to establish that you are getting value out of your Office 365 subscription by surfacing usage information for your Office 365 tenant as well as for each specific workload.”
Image Source: blogs.office.com
The new reports provide you with the ability to drill down on single services and also access detailed information at the individual user level. In order to enhance productivity and usage of Office 365 among your users and to effectively plan training and communications you will need to understand each service and how the individual end users in your organization are consuming or not consuming the service.
According to the official blog, the following reports are available to customers in the U.S., Australia, and Canada:
- Active Office 365 users
- Email activity
- Office activations
Rollout for Europe, APAC and Latin America will begin in April.
The company states,
“This is just the beginning. In April, we’ll make more reports available to U.S., Australian and Canadian organizations, providing insights on SharePoint and OneDrive site usage as well as on Yammer and Skype for Business activity—with organizations in Europe, APAC and Latin America following in May. More reports focusing on SharePoint and OneDrive for Business user activity and on user interaction with Office 365 (i.e. which browsers or operating systems do they use when they access the service) will be incrementally added.”
Image Source: blogs.office.com
Microsoft is also providing its users with Power BI Content Pack, which will combine your organization’s Office 365 usage data with your user’s information, in order to provide you with richer insights into how your users are using Office 365. The content pack will also provide you with advanced analytics scenarios, such as pivoting email usage by attributes like departments or regions and will make it easy for you to share insights within your organization. The Power BI Content Pack will be rolled out in June.
Image Source: blogs.office.com
Microsoft states,
“New privacy features will allow you to replace user level details with anonymized user information to protect users’ privacy and to enable you to comply with organizational requirements.”
This fall, the company will provide users with new public APIs, which will enable you to programmatically access the usage data and integrate it into custom applications like a company reporting portal.