Microsoft Expands Office 365 Usage Reporting; Provides Greater Insights

FREMONT, CA: Microsoft announces the rollout of usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and Yammer, enabling greater insights and visibility for IT administrators to monitor the usage of Office 365 in their organizations.

The reporting dashboard and user reports allow administrators to monitor services, identify issues and realize opportunities as it provides insights as to when its Office 365 organization users need training. The reporting dashboard provides a complete view into all of Office 365 services. The reporting portal now provides access into:

Activity dashboard

The activity dashboard provides a high-level overview of how many people in an organization use Office 365. Each service in the suite, such as Skype for Business and Exchange, has its own tile that surfaces key activity data. In order to view detailed information by service or by individual user, a click on the specific tile or drop-down menu at the top of the reporting dashboard allows viewing it.

Email activity report

The email activity report enables to understand email usage such as send, receive and read activity. It also enables to monitor trends in email traffic, and can be especially helpful in scenarios such as user migration.

Office activations report

Office activations report shows which users who havebeen assigned an Office 365 license have signed into Office 365 on at least one device, including a breakdown by device type. This report helps to identify users who have been assigned a license but have not yet activated it, so that admins can provide assistance as necessary.

SharePoint site usage report

SharePoint site usage report provides the storage consumption details across all SharePoint sites. The report helps to view the activity across sites, how much storage is available per site and how the sites are being used for file storage.

OneDrive for Business usage report

OneDrive for Business usage report helps to understand storage and sharing activity across OneDrive for Business, including number and size of files stored, in aggregate and per user.

Skype for Business report

Skype for Business report shows Skype for Business usage, with details such as minutes spent in a Skype Meeting and with breakouts on peer-to-peer activity such as IMs and calls, meetings organized and meeting participation.

Yammer report

Yammer report provides details on Yammer engagement—breaking out Like, Read and Post activities.

The reports provide aggregate and user-level information to enable easy planning and communication for the IT admin, allowing them to extract the full potential of Office 365 for their users.

The reports provide information for different timeframes. The timeframes range from 7 days to150 days. It also has the ability to export all reports into CSV format and then open them with a tool like Excel to quickly filter or pivot the data for further analysis.

"All reports provide you with both aggregate and user-level information, so you can effectively plan training and communication that helps your users to take full advantage of the potential of Office 365,"writes Anne Michels, a senior product marketing manager, Microsoft Office 365 Marketing, in a company blog posting. "For example, some of our preview customers shared the feedback that the Skype for Business usage reports helped them to increase the awareness of the Skype for Business capabilities among certain teams and, as a result, reduce the amount of travel needed."