When we announced Microsoft Productivity Score at Ignite, our goal was to provide you with insights that transform how work gets done. We could not at that time have predicted, just how important it would become in today’s world. Helping your organization be more productive despite the challenges you face today and getting the most out of Microsoft 365 is more critical than ever. We are working even harder to help you get even more meaningful and actionable insights into your organization.
Today we are happy to share with you recent investments in Productivity Score to help you get these insights. In the Employee Experience area there is now user-level granularity in all categories to help you determine who needs upskilling. There is also a new Communications category, designed to give you an understanding of how people are communicating and sharing. We are also integrating the Technology Experience components of Endpoint Analytics and Network Connectivity to help you understand how the technology in your environment affects productivity and the end-user experience.
Is technology an enabler to your organization’s productivity?
In November, we talked about how we wanted to make sure that the technology your organization uses is allowing your users to be as productive as they can. We recognize the impact that a network connection has on people’s ability to work quickly, collaborate effectively, and streamline business processes. We also understand the frustration that comes with poor network performance. This is why we now provide insights about your network connectivity to Microsoft 365 as part of Productivity Score.
Our goal is to help you improve your corporate network for an optimal Microsoft 365 experience. The Network Connectivity category provides visibility into core factors affecting your network, paired with suggestions to address problem areas. In addition, we provide a comparison view relative to other similar organizations in geographic proximity. These insights allow you to more easily identify and remedy network issues so you can spend more time on high-value work, and less time troubleshooting users’ issues around slow files load times and searches.
A high quality content collaboration experience is dependent on network performance – that’s why we also show an assessment of SharePoint and OneDrive connectivity in the Content Collaboration category page. Accessing documents in SharePoint and OneDrive requires bandwidth, which we measure as connectivity speed to the user’s machine. To learn more about optimal network configuration design, see the Microsoft 365 Network Connectivity Principles.
While connectivity is important, you also need a device to access, use, and edit the data. We’ve all been there, trying to get into an online meeting on time or to quickly power up the laptop to capture a great idea – only to be stuck watching a spinning cursor, be disrupted by updates, suffer through an endless logon process, or wait for support to help fix known issues! Endpoint performance and configuration issues are amongst the most frustrating and productivity killing challenges faced by IT and end users. More than one CIO or IT pro has told us that they get complaints about widespread problems like these on a daily basis, and that they are hungry for better ways to improve the situation.
That’s why the Endpoint Analytics category is now integrated into Productivity Score. With the initial release of Endpoint Analytics, we provide insights to help you understand and optimize your devices’ reboot and sign-in times, so your users are not late to that online meeting. It also helps you proactively remediate common support issues before your users become aware of them and to help reduce the number of calls your helpdesk gets. Endpoint Analytics also enables you to track the progress of enabling your devices to get corporate configuration data from the cloud, making it easier for employees to work from home.
And while visibility and insights are the foundation of helping you to focus on the areas where you can make the most impact, we want every insight we surface to be actionable. That’s why Endpoint Analytics also provides you with Recommended Actions and Automated Remediations that can translate these insights into action to help you make the biggest improvements to endpoint-related productivity killers and lowering help desk costs.
In total, Endpoint Analytics gives you a powerful tool to tackle endpoint-related productivity issues, maximize the effectiveness of IT, and lower help desk costs. Which translates into helping you do more, with less.
Now that everyone is working remotely, what do I know about how people are communicating?
Over the past few months our private preview partners shared great feedback on the Content Collaboration and Mobility insights. You also let us know how important it is to understand how people in your org communicate with each other every day. As we shift the way we work together, it’s critical to be able to identify how users are leveraging the various avenues of communication from traditional email messages, to persistent chat, and group communications via Yammer. Today, you can do that in the new Communication category. You can also explore more information around the distribution of chats vs. channel messages, @ mentions usage, and the frequency of Yammer posts responses.
Is everyone getting the most out of the solutions and, if not how can I help?
Organizations tell us that maximizing their investment in Microsoft 365 during the move to remote work is critical. With more people needing to collaborate and communicate in ways that they might not be used to, we hear that another job has been handed to you; helping people get up to speed on how to best leverage Microsoft 365. To help you coach people on adopting new behaviors and provide targeted guidance, the Employee Experience categories now provide you with user level details with organizational metadata from Azure AD. This info can help you understand if the marketing team could learn how to send links to documents instead of using attachments in email, or if the team in Japan is stepping up and helping out the community by answering questions in Yammer.
In talking with people in the private preview we heard that some organizations might consider these details sensitive and may not want to see it. At Microsoft, we firmly believe that you should have control over your data and determine if this level of detail meets the organizational policies you have in place. This is why we give you the choice of anonymizing the details. In the Settings area of the Admin Center go under Reports and select “Display anonymous identifiers instead of user, group, or site names in all reports”. If you have already enabled this setting for the usage reports, you do not need to select it again.
Join the preview!
If you are ready to help your organization be more productive and get the most from Microsoft 365, sign up for the Productivity Score preview at https://aka.ms/productivityscorepreview. Starting on May 12th until the end of May, we will fulfill requests every Tuesday. In June you will be able to enable the preview though the Microsoft 365 Admin Center by going to the Productivity Score section in the Reports menu. If you are already part of the preview you can see the Communications category and user level details now.
To get Endpoint Analytics insights will need to meet the pre-requisites here. For Network Connectivity insights to be enabled you must meet the pre-requisites are here.
Thanks for your interest and as always feel free to share your thoughts and questions below. If you have product feedback, feel free to use the feedback button in the bottom right of any Productivity Score page to get it directly to the team.
and learn about best practices directly from the product teams.