What’s new in Office 365 Usage Reporting – Ignite Edition
Published Sep 25 2017 04:18 AM 78.7K Views
Microsoft

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 TeamsUnderstand 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 menuA 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 PowerBIVisualize 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 AnalyticsAnalyze 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 scenarioUsage 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 scoreEasily 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

56 Comments

Great stuff Anne...when are you planning to release the Usage Score - Insights by Scenario and Maturity Level?

Iron Contributor

Thanks @Anne Michels for the update, do you have an idea about the availability of Advanced Usage Analytics ? is it early 2018 ? earlier in Q4/2017 ? 

Iron Contributor

Really great to hear you speak about this at Ignite @Anne Michels! So excited that Teams metrics are finally here.

Awesome work by the team Anne, Really pleased to see the Report Reader Role coming in as that's been a big ask at my clients that focus on least priviledge security!

Iron Contributor

Thanks @Anne Michels for the awesome updates. I am just curious to know about the difference between Office 365 Usage Analytics (currently as 'Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in PowerBI ') and Advanced Usage Analytics. 

Copper Contributor

It seems that you need Pro license.
It was very interesting when I actually did it with my own tenant.
Thank you very much.

Copper Contributor
What about security analytics? I have asking for a security widget for the admin home page of O365. This needs serious attention: to include, but not limited to, failed logon attempts, unusual activity that can be easily graphed like admin privilege changes or large amounts of data or document access inconsistent with prior history. in any event, we should not be stuck with reviewing the security audit logs or relying on vague alerts, etc. Though, the audit logs and alerts need a lot of work as well. Security is a big deal to MS, but MS can do much better. Let's get it done!
Copper Contributor

Super excited for all of this so we can intergrate it with SharePoint Vitals.  Heads up, Fast Track link is broken, should be https://fasttrack.microsoft.com/ 

Microsoft

Thanks for flagging, @Bradley Geldenhuys. I've fixed it.

Copper Contributor

Anne this is great and thank you for the timing updates on each solution. All of this is certainly tools and learnings I can use within my day to day conversations with my clients. I understand the role of the reports reader but what about a partner working with a client focused on driving adoption within a specific business unit, where we would not necessarily have access to the tenant administrational portal.

Microsoft

Thanks everybody for your feedback. We're currently planning to release the Usage Score mid or late 2018. ETA for Advanced Usage Analytics is also 2018. We'll share more details once avaialble.

Robert, Advanced Usage Analytics gives you more granular usage data. The cotnetn pack only includes tenant level aggregates for a maximum of 12 months, and you can only pivot by 3 AAD attributes. With Advanced Usage Analytics, you'll be able to access more granular data and combine it with any AAD attributes or data sources you might have.

Thanks,

Anne

Microsoft

Hi @Tony Carlin, you can have your customer create an account that has the reports reader role assigned for you without assigning the account with a license. Another option is to use the built in sharing capabilities in PowerBI.

Thanks,

Anne

Copper Contributor

First of all, this looks really promosing and exactly what we are looking for!

At the organisation where I work we started with creating our own dashboard in which we want to measure scenario's.  I have the following question: is there any possibilty that any functionality that shows insight in scenario's will be released before the Usage Score release (mid 2018)? In the current format without the a maturity level functionality, for instance.

Microsoft

Hi Rob, that's great to hear! We're still in early concept phase so we don't have timeline details yet. 

Thanks,

Anne

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Anne, Some concerns are coming up with regards to the Reader Role for usage reports: 1. The reader role has access to all the reports. It would be useful to be able to limit access by workload. In particular, there is a lot of demand for Yammer reports, but not necessarily some of the other workloads. 2. The named user data shown: while we definitely would want to make the charts available to more users, providing the ability to download named user information and drill down on how specific users are using workloads is a privacy issue. So yes, we can turn to anonymous data, but workload admins might still need the named information, so it would be good to either display the charts only to report readers, or have it as an optional switch 3. Specifically for Yammer, making the data anonymous also masks the names of groups. For me, that should remain visible, as we do want to see which are the most active groups. I know the product is evolving, so I hope some of the above can be incorporated at some point. Cheers, Ivo
Brass Contributor

We would like to track Planner and OneNote usage(desktop and mobile) in our organization. Will this information be available with Office 365 usage reporting soon ?

Mobile usage of OneNote is available via Intune reports in Azure.

Microsoft

Hi Dominic,

this is on our roadmap but we don't have a ETA yet.

Thanks,

Anne

Iron Contributor

Hi @Anne Michels and @Shilpi_Sinha do you know when Microsoft Graph reporting APIs will be in General Availability ?  (it was mentionned of next week last 25th Sept) :)

 

Microsoft

Hi Eric,

the graph API will reach GA in the next two weeks. We'll update the documenation then.

Thanks,

Anne

When usage score will be released?

Microsoft

Hi, 

Usage Score will become available mid or late 2018.

Thanks,

Anne

Copper Contributor

This is a great summary along with Ignite sessions. Good stuff, Anne.

Iron Contributor

Great to see all of this at Ignite and to disucss with you Anne.  Look forward to previews of the Usage Score and hopefully working with you and the team.

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Wow.. great news. Thanks for keeping us posted...

Copper Contributor
Nice but I'm still trying to figure why you guys have pretty much gutted Microsoft Access in terms of using it with SharePoint Online. PowerApps are to Access like a Yugo with only two wheels is to a brand new Porsche. I know you'd love everyone to just use .Net tools but you can get things done so much more quickly using Access.

Dear @Anne Michels, is it possible to add one of my accounts to the preview edition?

Microsoft

Hi Mohamed,

we're still working on the concepts mentioned above like Usage Score and Usage Analytics. There is not preview for these yet. The preview version of Usage Analytics - called Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in PowerBI - is already available to all customers. Please find more information here: 

https://blogs.office.com/2016/10/10/announcing-the-preview-of-the-office-365-adoption-content-pack-i...

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Hi Anne - really excited about seeing this come alive.  Any further info as to when this will be in Preview?

 

Thanks!

Copper Contributor

Is there a way to measure the co-authoring activity?  That is, how many documents/files have been co-authored during a time period.  Has co-authoring increased over time?

Iron Contributor

Hello Deborah Kong,

 

There is no direct way to measure co-authoring right now. I heard that 'O365 Usage Score' will give you the required metrics. O365 Usage Score is planned to release in this year as per Ignite-17 announcement

 

Meanwhile, you can compute these metrics by manipulating file-sharing and file-modified activities on documents/files. 

Brass Contributor

@Anne Michels, Thank you for your most informative post :)

 

We have been checking both our Office 365 Admin roles and Azure Directory Roles lists since September but we have not yet seen a Report Reader role appear. In your post you mentioned that "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"........ can you shed any light on why it might not be appearing for us here in Australia?

 

Also, maybe could you please indicate what the exact name of the role is? I notice there is Security Reader role in Azure......but not sure if this is related.

Microsoft

Hi @Justin Reading, you should be seeing it. It's called "Reports Reader". Please open a support ticket if you don't see it in the Office 365 admin center as role to choose.

Thanks,

Anne

Brass Contributor

hi @Anne Michels thank you for your help. We lodged a support call and magically the role appeared in our O365 tenant overnight....LOL

Brass Contributor

hi again @Anne Michels, on a not-unrelated topic could you please provide some insight as to why our SfB data is not showing in the analytics?

2018-02-06_9-25-02.jpg

 

Microsoft

Hi @Justin Reading, please open a support case for this.

Thanks,

Anne

Iron Contributor

Hi @Anne Michels great seeing the new things planned.  We are having some success with the Adoption and Content pack - just wondering when the Teams reports will be added and update into the existing pack - or do we need to download a new version of the pack?

 

Thanks

Adrian

Microsoft

Hi @Adrian Mannall, we're still working on an updated version of the content pack that will include information from the Teams reports. We'll share more information once available.

Copper Contributor

I'd like to know whether the user can search for an article of a FAQ and arrive efficiently.
I'd like to learn about a rank from which article of a FAQ is read most.
I'd like to learn about the hit rate from whether the user is able to designate a search word appropriately.
I'd like to know the word which wasn't found in the word designated by a search.

 

I'd like to grasp and improve the use reality of the FAQ in the SPO site now using PowerBI.

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Not applicable

Hello @Anne Michels do you have any updates on the usage score measuring insights by scenario and maturity level? I do not see it on the O365 roadmap and was curious if this is still being worked on or is cancelled. 

I am curious about the Usage Analytics + Score roadmaps.. And how is the Advanced version progressing? 

Brass Contributor

Today i installed the O365 Usage Analytics pack for Power BI.
WOW! This thing is RIDICULOUS!   What an amazing analytical tool. 

The level of detail it provides is incredible. 
thanks for making my job a whole lot easier!

how we can download this tool?

Still we are not able to locate some of the options in our tenant, let us know when it will be available

Copper Contributor

@Anne MichelsDoes everyone have access to Usage Analytics yet?  I can't seem to find access.  Apparently we are Australias biggest Teams user now and want to do some analytics on the data.

Iron Contributor

Any new info available? I thought I read somewhere that during Q2 an update to Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in PowerBI would be made.  Q2 came and went and we are anxiously awaiting the ability to "Visualize and analyze usage in PowerBI with Office 365 Usage Analytics" even better than before !

Finally, you got this out :) It seems that you can't share the report anymore (it is an app), instead persons with Report Reader-roles can access the data and use this. The data population was a lot faster than in preview. 

While there are great trends and reports, I was secretly hoping for more detailed information about Teams usage/adoption. But I suppose the APIs are not there yet. 

Still not able to view the usage analytics

Copper Contributor
@Vesa Nopanen My thoughts exactly. I want to see which Teams are most active, etc. Should be more straightforward. Instead I get user and department level visualizations/data. Seems like a big miss to not include Team usage for Teams, no?
Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

Does Microsoft support to query https://reports.office.com/pbi/v1.0/ with SSIS? I can access this data from Power BI and Powerbi Desktop and wanted to set up a process to extract the data and keep it for historical purposes, but can't seem to connect. I'm Using SQL 2016 SSIS.

 

Thanks

QMJ

 

Copper Contributor

any updates on the timeline of this feature? would love to preview it.

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