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Hello and welcome to Microsoft Mechanics Live! Coming up we're gonna take a look
at the latest updates to Office 365 for admins starting with the new adoption
pack or adoption content pack that allows you to track user adoption of
Office 365 services including things like licensed versus active users in the
service the apps that are used most for communication usage trends for
collaboration and services like onedrive and SharePoint and we'll even show you
updates to the admin centers for SharePoint and teams and Skype as well
as Message Center updates to do this I'm joined by Anne Michels who is
responsible for the Admin Center thank you always great to be on the show so
thanks for being here today a lot of announcements that we've had or on
Office 365 administration it sounds like the whole room is full of office 365
admins which is awesome so in the last couple of months we've done some great
things especially for Enterprise admins the highly anticipated long talked about
adoption content pack and Power BI it's available now in preview hopefully you
guys have been trying that out since May yes we are really excited about the
adoption Office 365 adoption content pack and
Power BI the usage reports in the admin Center they are a good starting point
for you to understand how your organization is using and adopting Office
365 but many of you have shared that you want to further analyze the data and
that you might want to understand how are you how your organization is using
the entire suite of products or how specific departments are using Office
365 and that's where power bi and adoption content pack can help you with
and the cool thing is because we're using Power BI it's all very interactive
you can query you can customize it it's a power powerful tool hence the name
absolutely let me show you so what you're seeing here is our pre-built
dashboard that gives you a cross product view of how your organization is using
and adopting Office 365 and for most of the reports for most of the data we also
show you information for the last 12 month so that you can easily see trends
in usage and I can see here the dashboards divided into areas like
adoption, communication, collaboration and you can drill into some of those areas a bit
more so each area gives you specific usage insights adoption for example
offers a high level summary of adoption trends then
communication highlights the products that you use the most to communicate
like exchange Skype and Yammer and collaboration similarly shows you how
your organization leverages OneDrive and SharePoint to collaborate when you click
into any of these tiles you can get deeper information let's take a look at
the adoption overview report because this is a really good starting point for
you to understand how your organization is using and adopting Office 365 because
it shows you the number of enabled users this is your licensed users in
comparison to the number of active users and you can also see returning users
month over month as well as first-time users by default this report gives you
information at the Office 365 level but 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 easily slice and dice together and get the information
that is relevant for you so this is really great I can see how the usage
view would also help focus in terms of where I might want to prioritize things
like user adoption training maybe communication as to things people should
be using versus other habits they might have currently this is really great and
powerful for admins that want to communicate to their users correct and
one of the big advantages that the content pack has over the use of reports
is that that it also shows you where your users are located as you can see
here in the map I can easily assess where my users are because what the
content pack does is that it takes all your users usage information and
combines it with your user your information in Azure Active Directory so
you can pivot by ad attributes such as location as we can see here and then
other reports we are also bringing in information about departments and
organization so as long as your information in AD is up-to-date then you
can get some really great insights now we've got a lot of admins here that can
probably customize reports and power bi is there anything I can do to really
customize and tweak the views we've got definitely because of course all of you
have very specific questions that you want to have
answers to so we have made sure that you can customize the content pack and the
power of the content pack really lies in the underlying data so there are three
ways how to customize the content pack you can either take one of the reports
that we have created like the adoption overview report and modify it all you
have to do is click on the little edit icon at the top or you can also create
your own visuals using all the data sets that we have or when you open this in
Power BI desktop you can also bring in additional data sources very cool and so
before we go further I know a lot of people are wondering how do you get all
this stuff wired up into your tenant so I can actually start using this right
now so let's jump into the Admin Center because the first thing that you need to
do is kick off the data preparation from the usage reporting page in the admin
Center on that page you will see a card for the adoption content pack and Power
BI the data preparation normally it 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 say for some time so I already see the button here that takes me straight
to Power BI right one of the requests that I've gotten from a lot of people
are maybe a CIO or something that at a higher level that shouldn't be tweaking
settings and configurations in the admin portal if they have too much access it
can be dangerous right how do we give them access to the reporting they
probably want without giving them access to all the admin controls that you don't
want them to mess with so you can do that of course using the built-in
sharing capabilities that we have in power bi but what we also announced this
week at Ignite is the new reports Reader roll that you can assign to anybody in
the organization directly in the Admin Center and when you assign somebody that
role they will be able to access the usage reports and the content pack while
at the same time you can make sure that they cannot accidentally configure or
change any settings that you have set oh come on this is amazing stuff reports
rolled it's that non admin role for people actually track you so this is
good stuff a lot of you have been asking us for
this for a long time so a lot of admins also want to know how their
organizations are using new stuff like maybe Microsoft Teams do we have
insights around that something something newish in that sense we have or we will
have very soon we just announced this week that we're adding two new usage
reports to the admin center that will help you understand how your
organization is using Microsoft Teams and we're also adding a new cut to the
main dashboard that gives you a quick overview and that shows you at one
glance how many of your users are active in teams then when you dive into the
reports we first have the Microsoft Team's user activity report and that
report really shows you how your users are using Microsoft Teams and what
activity is most popular in your organization like chat messages or
meetings or calls the second report is the Microsoft Team's app usage report
this report helps you understand how you people connect to Microsoft Teams
including mobile apps of course as well that's really helpful I can see how this
information can can you also see how the information is in the adoption content
pack and we get that as well in the Power BI experience not yet okay but
very very soon we announced this week that the adoption content pack in Power
BI yes we could not have thought of a longer name will reach GA at the
beginning of 2018 and it will be renamed to Office 365 usage analytics and it
will include more information especially more data and metrics around
teamwork and we will bring in all the usage data about Microsoft Teams about
Office 365 groups and also Yammer groups show us I will so what you're seeing
here is the first view of the new dashboard that of course for all the
product the cross product views will include data around Microsoft Teams
we're also adding new reports to the dashboard and we're adding an entire new
section on social collaboration that will help you understand how your people
use my Office 365 for teamwork and this actually how they leverage Microsoft
teams to do so we're adding a new report specifically for Microsoft Teams that
does not only show you how many active users you have but that also shows you
how many active teams you have and how activity in teams has evolved over time
great so there's also a new admin center that we're bringing out for teams and
for Skype and kind of a unified experience can you give us a preview of
that sure so to enable you to better manage the various aspects of Microsoft
Teams and Skype for business we're introducing in new Microsoft Teams and
Skype Admin Center that will become available to all of you later in the
year the new admin center we have here a sneak peek at the new homepage it's got
a very descriptive name I might add that's correct yes Microsoft Teams and
Skype for Business Admin Center and that is correct
very descriptive so that you are really always know where you are right but so
this new admin center brings together the various tools that we have today and
then consolidates them into one single coherent admin experience so that you
have a one-stop location to manage all the aspects of both Microsoft Teams and
Skype what you're seeing here is a really a first mock-up of the home page
that will show you important information like for example call quality or call
volume very cool so we're also working on a brand new SharePoint Admin Center
experience I know a lot of people love seeing this with Jeff deeper a couple
days ago but can we show it can we show that so the new SharePoint admin setup
which is available to all of you in preview right now and will become
available will hit GA at the beginning of next year makes it really more
effective for you to manage SharePoint the homepage shows you important
information like you can see directly how your organization is using
SharePoint as we're bringing in all the information from the usage reports at
the bottom we're bringing in notifications from the message center so
that you can always stay up to date with new features and SharePoint and OneDrive
and you can also directly see if there any incidents that you'll pick that your
tenet is currently impacted by so do we have any other improve
that we're making to help our admins out definitely so many of you have shared
that you want to have more visibility into new features that are rolling out
to your tenon and specifically also if there any actions that you need to take
so we also announced a lot of improvements to the Message Center this
week right and having better visibility when features start to roll out as super
important for admins to prepare and you might want to train say for example your
helpdesk or end users or the training staff themselves and possibly build
adoption campaigns and plans to get people using the new technology exactly
and to help you with that we are introducing the concept of major updates
because you of course today receive a lot of messages in the Message Center
that is part of our transparency promise to you but going forward we're adding a
new carousel to the top of the message center that highlights all the
announcements related to major updates so what a major updates well major
changes in your tenant like for example if we are rolling out a new service or
new application or if there's a change that requires an admin action for all
the major updates you will receive three notifications both in your message
center and also we are email the first notification an email notification is
this real it's as real hey guys have been asking for this for a while just
like a newsletter or something right correct and you will receive three
notifications one when we announce the major update a second one when it starts
to roll out - first release and a third one when the feature starts to roll out
broadly and the notification that you receive when the feature goes into first
release will state very clearly how long the feature will save in first release
so that you know exactly how much time you have to plan for it this is really
cool because even though we expect that all of you are going into the admin
portal every single day to look at the message center to see what's we rolling
out it probably isn't that realistic to assume that that's happening for
everyone so this is really going to be helpful in terms of getting the
modalities of communication that you want that's correct but many of you have
also shared that you want to get this information directly to your inbox
not only for major updates but for all of the notifications in the message
center and that's what the weekly digest helps you with the weekly digest is a
summary of all of your message center messages that comes directly to your
inbox on a weekly basis and the reason the weekly digest has now reached GA and
has started to roll out to all customers worldwide very cool so you can configure
all of this with preferences via the Admin Center and get the modality again
that you want to have so this is something that you guys have wanted for
a long time something else that folks I've I've been asking for for a long
time as well is the ability to home your users in multiple geographies so we've
also announced multi-geo capabilities this week to also be able to store data
in the regions of your choice based on say data residency needs that you might
have right exactly for those of you that have data residency needs we introduced
multi-geo capabilities in Office 365 this week and with this feature you can
now have a single tenant that spans across multiple Office 365 data center
tiers and at the same time you can decide you can choose for each of you
users where there Office 365 data is at rest as thought and that works both for
existing users for new users of course and you can also move existing users so
here's what that looks like so for example if I have a new user I can
actually define where they start so where their data stores are gonna begin
from and if I've got an existing user I can actually move them out of one geo
into another and we've actually just released a video on this for Microsoft
Mechanics this week where we kind of describe the different paths and ways to
do this using PowerShell to move users around if their pre-existed in your
tenant once you've already done that what that looks like is you'll have an
enumeration of the various sites that you've actually configured for things
like the OneDrive Admin Center or other locations where you've got multiple
geographies so mailboxes other things can be in other geographies as well so a
really cool experience here especially if you've got those data residency needs
where you want to have for example some users data reside in Europe some in
North America some in Asia Pacific we can now do that
it's a very cool stuff so thank you so what's the best way than to experience
all of these new updates so some of them available for you to use today for
example the reports Reader roll you can assign that to users in your admin
center today the Microsoft Teams report you have to wait a little bit longer but
not long mid-October that's when we will start rolling that out the other updates
like the new SharePoint Admin Center and the new Microsoft Teams and Skype Admin
Center those will become available over the next couple of month simply keep an
eye out for notifications in your message center of course so of course
you can check it the links shown because we actually have I've actually linked to
the Message Center if you're logged in and you can use the aka link that will
pop up in just a second and of course if you want to hear all of the updates oh
there it is if you want to hear all the updates around not only Office 365 admin
and SharePoint and everything else across Microsoft keep checking back to
Microsoft Mechanics that's all the time we have for this show thanks for
watching we'll see you next time. Thank you!
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