Coming up we take a look at the latest reporting insights available for Office 365 admin.
Starting with the new content pack that allows you to track
user adoption of Office 365 services.
Including license versus active users for a service,
the apps that are used most for communication.
Usage trends for collaboration services like OneDrive or SharePoint.
And will even show you updates to the newest Office 365 service health dashboard
to help you stay on top of incidents.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined once again by Anne Michels
from the Office 365 admin team, welcome.
Thank you, it's great to be on the show again.
So last time you joined us
the new Office 365 Admin Center just reached general availability.
And today we're actually announcing the highly anticipated adoption content pack for Power BI
that's available for customers as well.
Yes we are really excited about the content pack.
The usage reports in the Admin Center which we looked at in the last show,
they are good starting point for admins to understand
how their end users are using the individual services within Office 365.
But many of you want to further analyze the data
to understand how your users may be using the entire suite of services.
Or how active they may be within specific regions or departments.
And the great thing is because it's in Power BI
you now have the ability to actually be interactive with the reports and get more querying within the data.
Exactly, let me show you.
So what we're seeing here is our dashboard for the content pack.
which gives you a cross product view of how you end users are using the various services within Office 365.
For most of the data, we give you a view of the last 12 months
so that you can easily see how usage is trending.
Right and I see here that the dashboard is also divided into areas like adoption,
communication and collaboration.
Can you drill into some of those?
Sure, so each area gives you specific usage insights.
Adoption for example offers an all-up summary of adoption trends,
Communication highlights the services
that people use the most to communicate
like Exchange or Skype.
Collaboration similarly
highlights which services your end-users uses to collaborate.
Like OneDrive and SharePoint.
By clicking into any of the tiles,
I can get deeper information.
So let's take a look at the adoption overview report as an example.
This report enables you to understand
how adoption has evolved over time.
As it shows you the number of enabled users.
This is your licensed users.
In comparison to the number of active users, returning users, and first-time users.
You can see the information at the Office 365 level
Or you can also switch to a product specific view.
We have built contextual filters like this one
into many of the reports
so that you can slice and dice the data to really get the insights that are relevant to you.
Really good.
So I can see how this usage view might help you focus on what you might need to prioritize.
For example, the workloads that you might want to do more
training or communication with, right?
Yeah let's jump back to the dashboard.
So when we drill into the collaboration section,
I can see how my users
are using OneDrive and SharePoint to collaborate.
To enable you to understand the full picture,
the report does not only show you how many of your users are active
on OneDrive or SharePoint.
But it also shows you how many users are active on their own account
in comparison to accounts owned by others.
Right and you can really see if users are actually collaborating, which is the nice thing here.
Because if for example you own the account.
but I'm using that account in this case.
I'm actually collaborating with you on a file that is stored within your OneDrive.
Exactly and this is a really good indicator to understand
if your end users use it only to store documents
or if they actually use OneDrive and SharePoint
to share content
and to collaborate with others on content.
Right, and you mentioned before that you could also get a view of how users, specific departments or locations
are also using Office 365, how does that work?
That is one of the big advantages of the content pack.
As you can see here in this heat map,
I can easily assess whether
users in one region use a specific product more than users in another region.
In the content back we combine the usage data
with the active directory information of your users.
So you can pivot by AD attributes such as location as we can see here.
In other reports, we are also bringing in
information about departments or organizations.
So as long as your information in AD is up to date
you can get some really great insights.
Very cool and because its Power BI, one of the great things is you can also
share things out.
So for example, in the other reporting we have within the admin console
you might not want to give admin permissions to other people in the org.
But now because the reports are just in Power BI,
you can share them with anybody in the Aure Active Directory.
Exactly.
Directly here from the dashboard, I can easily share all these insights
with anybody within my organization
using the sharing capabilities that we have in Power BI.
Are there things I can do to customize these reports or build my own reports within here?
So there are a few ways you can customize the reports.
On one end, you can take one of the reports
one of the visuals that we have built
and modify it.
For example, here in our adoption overview report
if you don't want to see returning users or first time users,
you can simply remove that information and delete it from the chart.
You can also create your own visuals.
Or if you're using Power BI desktop,
you can also bring in your own data sources.
Really great to see but before I go further
I bet people are wondering how do I get this all wired up in my own tenant?
So the first thing you need to do is to instantiate the content pack from the Office 365 Admin Center.
You first need to enable it on the services and add-ins page
in the report section.
Afterwards, you will see in your cart
from where you can start the data preparation.
Which normally takes between 2 and 48 hours depending on the size of your tenant.
In our case here today, I've already taken care of that
to save time here.
I am already seeing the button here which takes me directly to the content pack.
So this really augments some of the things that we saw last time with the usage reports
in the admin console.
but another thing that we've also worked on recently is the Office 365 service health dashboard.
And that's also in general availability.
Can we also look at the the new service health dashboard?
Sure.
So the new service health dashboard
gives you a more personalized and more actionable insights for service incidents
that may be affecting your tenant.
So when you come to the new service health dashboard,
you will see that it features a new view
that separates major business critical outages from others
and splits them into two categories.
Incidents and advisories.
This new view makes it easier for you to identify those business critical incidents
that you may want to act on right away.
That's really helpful.
Can you get more information underneath any specific incident?
Yes we also have a new summary view
which surfaces all the business critical and relevant details.
Quick and easy to consume.
And for Exchange Online related incidents,
we now also show you the number of impacted users.
And you can of course expect us to extend this capability
to further workloads over time.
Great, so I'll know if my boss or my peers are affected.
Is there anything further than we can share in terms of
what we're doing for admins to make Office 365 better?
This is just the beginning.
our goal is to provide you with richer and more actionable service health insights
that will help you to not only stay on top of incidents,
but that will also help you to improve your internal support experience.
And to improve the overall end user experience.
So we are working right now for example on text and email notifications.
So that you can find out about an incident right when it happens.
And also to have the ability for you to proactively check the services help for a specific user
by running a test against our services.
It seemed especially interesting and helpful with the help desk scenarios
where you might get ahead of possible health issues
Possibly even before you get help desk calls coming from your end users.
But what's the best way to start experiencing these new updates?
The service health dashboard is already available for all of you.
Simply go to your admin Center and click on service health.
And as I showed you earlier,
you can now also instantiate the adoption content pack
directly from the Office 365 Admin center.
So really lots of great updates Office 365 admins
and what they can do here in the console.
And of course keep watching Microsoft Mechanics for the latest tech updates across Microsoft.
Thanks for watching and goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics