Yammer Analytics in the Office 365 Admin Center

[Noah Sparks]

Share your experience around getting insights about Yammer from the Office 365 Admin Center usage reporting. While waiting for roles are you able to access these reports? Do you lean on the adoption content pack? Do you officially sit in IT? 

Just curious about lived experience with Yammer and analytics needs.

[#2]

I've tried a couple times to get the Analytics Adoption Pack to work in PowerBI to no avail, but I haven't tried Support yet (I'm also not a PowerBI guy).

The stats in the O365 Admin center are okay. We really need Group-level reporting.

I'm an IT service owner for Yammer and other O365 tools.

[#3]

Rats! Wonder where you are getting hung up. We had our Power BI guru situate it for us. I've found that it confirms a lot of what I already knew but doesn't give me much to explore beyond broad categories like department usage.

What questions are you or others in your org asking about Yammer? How do you deliver insights today?

[#4]

I'm a consultant leading the Yammer adoption at this company. Because of that, I don't have Verified Admin rights which is a real problem, as the folks that do are still learning how the system works. The inability to easily see robust metrics (why does it need to have a PowerBI guru set it up?) is going to be a real hindrance to the adoption process.

[#5]

Sounds like a great opportunity, Ori! I hope you get the metrics piece situated. It's already a serious challenge *without* insights. That's probably why @Simon Denton made metrics a requirement for his involvement with cultivating Yammer use. 

I don't believe the Power BI portion is all that difficult. You just have to have the right permissions if I'm not mistaken. How are you planning to proceed with the project, Ori?

[#6]

I have access as I sit in GT with a network login and have been able to get the Power BI to work.. We like a lot of companies (I have heard talking on Yammer networks) have the challenge of providing to Group owners who DONT have access to these reports are asking for - a list of members in their group so they can target people who arent in them...other Group activity data like - read content each month - and how many liked or looked at files shared.... Currently not something I can provide but I understand is on the Microsoft roadmap to provide?

[#7]

We make use of three sources for Yammer usage. I'm a Global Admin as well as a SharePoint and Yammer Admin where we've had Yammer since 2012 and have around 8,000 employees.

The first is the Yammer Analytics Dashboard in the Yammer Admin portal. This gives us an idea of the number of members 'engaged', the number of (private and public) messages, and which groups were most active.

The second is the'Yammer Activity' section in the Office 365 Reports - Usage area. This gives us an idea of the number of items posted, read and liked - our 'posted' to 'read' ratio appears to be about 1/99. The activity graph over a period of time is useful and we can see how many items each user posted, read and liked (telling us who are the most active posters or readers).

The third is the Power BI Office 365 Adoption Preview. This gives us an insight into Office 365 adoption, which is just starting here - which is why the above two reports are very useful. The 'Product usage' tab gives an idea of Yammer usage compared with other products, but this is not yet overly useful. The 'Communication' tab compares Exchange and Yammer but it is not yet overly helpful; this may change once Exchange usage in the cloud picks up. The 'Access from Anywhere' tab tells us how people are accessing Yammer- we can see that mobile access is picking up. In the 'Yammer User Activity' tab, the two sections 'Ten most active companies' and 'Ten most active departments' are not helpful as they are both 'blank'. This may be a symptom of our just starting out with Office 365.

[#8]

Unfortunately, it doesn't provide nearly as much info as I would've liked. The one thing it does have an advantage over the one I created is that it can see aggregate views/reads, but beyond that it doesn't provide much more than you can create inside Tableau in a few hours. If you don't have Tableau experience, it might take a few hours a day for a week or two.

Here is my Tableau Report. I've included it so u can perhaps see what things I may consider important but also realize the shortcomings of the data and provide something more robust for us. I've removed the data, but I made these dashboards in Tableau with JUST the messages csv. The export is run at set intervals and Tableau server refreshes it. The only things I'm missing is including likes(though I have ways to collect data and include dates), Access data(simply logging in),  and view/read count (per message), which for us are very important metrics to measure overall engagement and campaigns (#hashtag)

I could easily include the ability to dive down into the data right inside Tableau as well.

[#9]

Finally got the Adoption Pack to work, though as not a PowerBI person it still seems difficult to use to slice/dice data. For sure this is a learning topic for me. (but, please Microsoft, don't take away the easier to use basic reports in the Admin Center).

[#10]

Kudos for getting the adoption content pack plugged in, @Kevin Crossman. I attempted a few times to slice and dice but I quickly learned that wasn't really the intent here unfortunately.

I agree that group level analytics is where the magic happens in large orgs, @Mandy Clark. @Andrew Warland, departments and companies are likely pulled from Azure AD so I would take a look there for that tab to be useful. That segmenting is the one only I find somewhat interesting as I can break out how department use compares to one another. 

@Victor Nguyen, thank you for sharing your Yammer dashboard built off the native export! Is this Tableau report shared beyond admins? Are you watching how much use the report gets? The weekly / monthly message deltas / changes likely highlight the cyclical nature of networks. Do you intervene in certain scenarios? I attempted to time (down to the hour) posts when peak activity occurred in the network and alert others to popular times as well. Have you aggregated, for example, Monday activity by hour? I echo your list of missing insights.

A few others from Microsoft might want to join this conversation and gather additional insights specific to Yammer and analytics. @Shilpi_Sinha, @Anne Michels, @Steve Nguyen

[#11]

@Noah Sparks- we have been using the 'free' Yammer service since 2012. Until our Yammer service is fully connected with the Office 365 environment, user's profiles are not tied with AD and so Departments won't show (or won't show correctly - we disabled 'Org Chart' as it was creating confusion).

[#12]

I've downloaded PowerBI and will work with our VAs to get a regular export of the data. I'll have to go online to find some templates/tutorials on building the reports and dashboards I need.

[#13]

I saw this in our O365 Admin Message Center this week>

Updated feature: Usage Reports

MC113102

Stay Informed

Published On : August 8, 2017

We continue to update the usage reports in the Office 365 admin center to provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365. This message is associated with Office 365 Roadmap ID 16811 and 16810.

How does this affect me?

We’re adding a new Yammer groups activity report that will help you understand how your users leverage Yammer groups to communicate and collaborate in your organization. We're also enhancing the existing Office 365 groups report to include file activities performed by users in the group’s SharePoint site as well as any message activity users perform in the Yammer group associated with the Office 365 group. We'll begin rolling this out in the following days, and the roll out will be completed by the end of August. This rollout is excluded from Office 365 subscriptions in ITAR and German national Cloud.

Tech Community: New Yammer groups usage report and updated Office 365 groups report

[#14]

Any luck so far?

[#15]

I seem to have issues with the more easily accessible engagement statistics of Yammer (I am Yammer admin, no O365 admin). Any insights what is happening? We have lots of activity, but it does no longer report it. Love to see the other reports as well (but will not be able to get to it as no O365 admin role, so a fix would really help). Also, I believe this analytics should be closer to the users, why can only admin people see this. Please open up as our users want to understand engagement in more detail as well. 

[#16]

@Noah Sparks 

I'd like to see a more sophisticated level of reporting within PowerBI for Yammer, at individual group level and overall.

The data exists, and yet the level of analysis that can be reached by 'downloading full report' is minimal.

Other analytics platforms are way ahead of the curve on this. It should be standard to identify:

* Most active users - by name
* Most influential users - by name
* Most engaged users
* Most liked posts

* Group placement - most active group

Yes, I'm aware that you offer the Adoption Pack, but this is clunky and not particularly helpful from a community management perspective. Similarly, plugging in each individual report from a CSV is time-consuming, and still doesn't provide the level of data that I need. 

What are the plans in this space? 

[#17]

All of these desired reports were native to Yammer years ago. They empowered me as a community manager to do what I needed. There are specific reasons why they are no longer offered privacy being one of them. I scratch my head a bit when thinking people would like privacy when voluntarily turning to enterprise social / community solutions. You may want to explore getting access to the Reports Reader role from your Office 365 admin. More info here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/activity-reports/activity-reports?view=o365-worldwi....

[#18]

This thread is old but there’s really not much happened in terms of getting holistic view of the Yammer service - Yammer reports. However, the community insight from within the community is slick but this is only for a specific community. Needs this kind of insight for the overall Yammer service from then Yammer admin centre.

The analytics / usage reports of each app/service needs to be in each service/app’s admin centre in addition to M365 admin centre. E.g. Yammer, Teams, SharePoint, etc. So they can be accessed by the admins who are looking after this app/service, and not requiring access to M365 admin centre for this type of reports.

And the report should not require additional patch works like using Power BI to see a good analytics. This makes things complicated really.