New usage reports for Microsoft Teams
Published Nov 29 2017 11:05 PM 105K Views
Microsoft

Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork that provides people with a single place to communicate and collaborate with others and has become a crucial tool for millions of people.

Sometimes, however, people need a helping hand to get started with Microsoft Teams. For example, if someone doesn’t use Teams yet, they might not know how to get started or understand how they can leverage the service to be more productive and collaborative. In either case, the IT department or non-IT staff such as training managers might want to connect with this person to provide them with more information or training resources.

Today, we’re pleased to announce two new usage reports for Microsoft Teams that enable you to understand how your users are leveraging Teams to communicate and collaborate.

 

Track usage of Microsoft Teams

When you better understand how employees use Microsoft Teams, it is easy to decide where to prioritize training and communication efforts. Here’s a look at the new reports:

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 a chat in a channel, 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.

Microsoft Teams user activity reportMicrosoft Teams user activity report

 

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.

Microsoft Teams app usage reportMicrosoft Teams app usage report

We've included the usage data from Microsoft Teams in the at-a-glance widget on the usage reporting dashboard which gives you a cross-product view of how users communicate and collaborate using the various services in Office 365.

Get a cross-product view of how your users are using Office 365Get a cross-product view of how your users are using Office 365

In addition, you’ll find a new card for Microsoft Teams at the bottom of the dashboard. The tile gives you an overview of the activity in Teams - including the number of active users - so that you can quickly understand how many users are using the service.

New Microsoft Teams card on the usage reporting dashboardNew Microsoft Teams card on the usage reporting dashboard

How to access the reports

Both of the reports are now available for you in your admin center. On the admin center homepage, click on Reports and on Usage or into the Active Users card. You will land on the usage reporting dashboard where you can select the respective report from the dropdown menu at the top of the page.

How to access the new reportsHow to access the new reports

Who can access the reports

The usage reports in the admin center can be accessed by people that are assigned with a global admin or a product specific admin role (Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint).

As the task to drive usage and adoption of Office 365 is often shared by the IT department and non-IT staff such as training managers, we also recently introduced a reports reader role that you can assign to any user in the Office 365 admin center who needs to have access to the reports. By assigning this role to your business stakeholders you can make sure that they have access to the usage insights that are crucial in enabling them to successfully drive and track adoption.

Use the reports reader role to provide access to the reportsUse the reports reader role to provide access to the reports

Let us know what you think!

Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower right corner of the admin center. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your idea via User Voice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs.

 

—Anne Michels, @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager Microsoft Teams

53 Comments
Silver Contributor
Great news @Anne Michels for all Microsoft Teams customers. Thanks and congratulations on your new role.
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Thanks this is what a lot of customers are waiting for :)

Hi Anne,

 

I posted a question about guest user activity data in https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365/Teams-Usage-Reports-in-Office-365-Admin-Center/m-p.... Can you answer here or there?

 

Thanks,

TR

Iron Contributor

These usage products look great. Any plans on adding columns like teams or channels to the usage reports.

 

So for instance you can see which team is popular ;)

Great News Anne ! Thanks for Sharing !

What would be 'other activity' in the user activity report?

Admin activities like creating a new channel?

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Can you list or explain what the "Other Activity" entails in the user activity report so we can use this as a better deliverable?

Iron Contributor

Thanks @Anne Michels - great to see these light up.  Could you explain what some of the data points are behind "Has other action"?

 

Are there plans for actual Team (as in the Group) based analytics - Team XYZ has this many channels, has this many posts, has this many likes, has this post frequency per channel (calculated value) etc?

Iron Contributor

 

Great progress. Thanks for all your work on this.

 

Quick question/wish list request:

An overview of which services are being most used in tabs across all teams/channels with drilldown capabilities.

(YouTube - 100 tabs , pptx files - 80 tabs, excel files - 40 tabs, planner - 20 tabs, trello - 20 tabs, etc..)

 

Any way of getting this info, via PowerShell or API, would be a great start

 

Copper Contributor

Great progress!,

 

When will we have Team related usage?

Example:

 

files uploaded

Channel meeting

Post / Publications

New members added

Tabs added

etc

etc

 

In time we need to create clean-up processes, since Teams at the end of the day will be taking up storage quota from SharePoint. We will like to identify which Teams have had no activity at all in the last X months. 

Brass Contributor

Excellent news :)

 

Is it possible that the 'Reports reader' role hasn't rolled out to all tenants yet ?

Iron Contributor

@Steffan Hoeke - I would be surprised if that is the case.  Our standard tenant received the role over a month ago.

Iron Contributor

Thank you for sharing @Anne Michels, great, much expected addition indeed. 

 

It would be great if these are included into the Content pack for Power BI, already exposing loads or visuals, but also to embedded as Tab par example. Of course additional measurements could make this a great much looked after way to measure adoption.

 

C:\>Marius

Copper Contributor

Great new, thaks

 

Microsoft

Thanks all for your feedback and questions. We're working on a report that will show usage at the team level. We're also planning to include the Teams data in the GA version of the content pack. We're aiming for both for spring 2018.

@Tony Redmond, it's correct that the report does not include activity from guest users. Activity like channel creation can be found in the audit log in the security & compliance center.

@Steffan Hoeke, the reports reader role has been rolled out ww. So if you're not seeing it in your tenant, please open a support ticket.

Many thanks @Anne Michels for the update !

Brass Contributor

@Clifford Kennedy & @Anne Michels The role was indeed there; I did not click through far enough ;)

 

Will it be possible to determine which reports a user with that role can access ?

Iron Contributor

@Steffan Hoeke - good to hear! 

If you have the report reader role, you can see any of the Office 365 reports available in the Admin Center. You can also use the Office 365 content pack for Power BI. You should also be able to view reports generated by ISV reporting products, but that depends on the implementation of security within a specific product.

Bronze Contributor

When might we anticipate this support article being updated with Teams details on what qualifies as active usage? https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Active-user-in-Office-365-usage-reports-093A6D0D-890B-489E-...

Microsoft

Thanks for flagging @Noah Sparks, we'll update the site.

Brass Contributor

In the report are "calls" both an audio or audio/video call?

Microsoft

Hi @Charles Shaw, calls are 1:1 (peer to peer) calls, could be video and/or audio. Meetings are when more than two people are on audio or video and/or they join via a meeting invite it’s a meeting. Thanks for flagging. We'll update our support documentation.

Copper Contributor

Wishlist from our user is to have report that contains the following :

  • MS Team Name 
  • MS Team Date Created
  • MS Team Owner(s)
  • MS Team No. of Members and their individual names
  • MS Team File Sizes of each complete Team
  • MS Team Last Modified/Date of Last Acitivty
  • Number of Channels and their names
  • Connect Apps & Tabs for each Team and Channel

Anything in the pipeline for this?

 

Microsoft

@null Zanida Ariffin we're working on a team specific report. We'll share more information when we're closer to the release date.

Thanks,

Anne

Gold Contributor

What are the chances we could get these reports emailed on a scheduled basis?

Microsoft

Hi @Tony Derricott, we're exploring email reports, it's in our backlog.

Iron Contributor

Any updates on the  "Has Other Action" field?  What actions would be included in Has Other actions?

Microsoft

Hi @Ona Bonsell, the field accounts for a variety of actions including creating a team, adding a user to a team etc. We're working on breaking this information out more clearly in the future

Iron Contributor

Thank you, @Anne Michels.

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It's nice to see at a high level how adoption is going but we really need a more granular view of Teams/Groups usage. 

What Teams are being used?

  • How are they being used? Conversations? Files? Planner? Stream? Number of Channels and activity in a channel?
  • What apps are being added/removed?
  • What connectors are being added/removed?

What teams are not being used? So that we can determine why.  What is the tool? Lack of interest? Temporary Team?

Number of teams a person is on.

Number of teams with each department.

Number of files uploaded/active with each team.

Number of conversations within each team.  

 

Ability to break these metrics down by specific Week/Month/Qtr.

 

These are just a few that would help in planning and adoption of Teams.

Couple of ideas.

 

1. Use the techniques explored in the PowerShell script outlined in https://www.petri.com/identifying-obsolete-office-365-groups-powershell to figure out what's happening inside Teams.

 

2. Use the Teams PowerShell cmdlets to generate reports of team membership, etc. See https://www.petri.com/teams-powershell-primer 

 

PowerShell is a pretty good tool for these kind of things...

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Not applicable

Thanks Tony.  I am not sure I had seen #1 before.   As for the Teams PS API it is weak and I have found it useless for what I am trying to pull.  Not sure why they did not open it for Admins to query more then the teams of the login user.  I would need to make the Admin part of every Team.  That's not a solution.  Will dig into the first but I am skeptical that I will be able to dig down deep enough into the raw data on a per Team bases.

Yes, the PowerShell module for Teams is weak and needs to be improved. But it's surprising what a combination of the Groups PS cmdlets, Exchange PS cmdlets, Azure AD cmdlets, and the Teams cmdlets can deliver. For membership, you don't need to make an admin a part of the team. For channels, if that is important, you could make the admin a member before reading the channel info for a team, and then remove them afterwards. 

Microsoft

Is it possible to show report based on individual Teams rather than the whole tenant. This would be very useful when setting up pilots. 

 

Thanks 

 

Jo 

 

Iron Contributor

Hey @Jo Johnstone - the product team are working on this based on @Anne Michels comments above to a similar question.

Copper Contributor

Hi @Anne Michels,

 

I was wondering if there has been any progress on the team specif report that @null Zanida Ariffin mentioned in an earlier post?

 

Specifically, info on:

  • MS Team Name 
  • MS Team Date Created
  • MS Team Owner(s)
  • MS Team No. of Members and their individual names
  • MS Team File Sizes of each complete Team
  • MS Team Last Modified/Date of Last Acitivty
  • Number of Channels and their names
  • Connect Apps & Tabs for each Team and Channel

Thanks,

Paul.

Copper Contributor

@Clifford Kennedy on the earlier question about usage statistics on individual teams..  when would this feature be available on teams? also will this be available for individual team admins vs just the o365 admins... Would be a great way for team owners to manager and understand engagement levels and usage

Iron Contributor

 

Looking forward to the outcome of this.
Copper Contributor

Can this be exported to Power Bi for a live report 

Iron Contributor

Hi @Aswin Rajan - sorry for the slow reply.  I have not seen any timing myself on when these updates are likely to ship - sorry.  As for the workload admin - there is a reporting admin role available - have you looked at this option? 

Copper Contributor

Hi, @Anne Michels. What is included in "Other Activity"?

Copper Contributor

What I need for Teams more than anything else is a way to get a full list of session details, as in the SessionDetails view (and related views) in the Skype for Business LcsCdr database. The closest I can find is a "Get-CsUserSession" Powershell command for "Skype for Business Online", but that doesn't seem to show any sessions place through MS Teams.

 

 

Does any equivalent exist for Teams sessions?

 

Copper Contributor

 As a main source of collaboration in our company. I strongly urge Microsoft to add more detailed info into their Teams platform. Overall usage is a very small start. Its give a good picture of what is happening but thats about it. Detailed reporting on a Team by Team and channel by channel level is essential. 

 

Examples for my wishlist:

 

Team X had this many posts in (given timeframe)

User X posted this many times in (given timeframe)

Etc...

 

I firmly second @Anonymous comments and feedback above

 

Copper Contributor

can i generate a monthly report of usage?

Brass Contributor

Do we have any option to get a report of Audio Usage minutes by person?

Iron Contributor

Hey all! Did someone find out what is included in "other activity"?

 

Also, in device usage "windows" would be the desktop application?

 

@Anne Michels please let us know!

Brass Contributor

According to Microsoft Docs:

"Other activity is the number of other team activities by the user some of which include, and not limited to: liking messages, apps, working on files, searching, following teams and channel and favoriting them."

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-activity-reports

Iron Contributor

When would the Global reader role be able to get access to Teams Reporting in the Teams Admin Center?

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