Welcome to Microsoft Mechanics.
Coming up, we'll take a look at the latest admin tool updates for administering Office 365
including the redesigned Office 365 Admin Center
to make it easier to perform management tasks including customizing your dashboard.
We'll look at new usage reports to track which Office 365 services are being used
down to the individual user.
And, how you can share reports and expand reporting insights
with the upcoming content pack for Power BI.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined today by Anne Michel's from the Office 365 team, welcome.
Thanks, it's great to be on the show.
So congrats we've done a lot of updates to the Office 365 Admin Center
and now we've released it to general availability.
Yes, we've made a lot of updates to the new Office 365 Admin Center in the last couple of months.
We've really focused on improving the overall Office 365 management experience.
But also at the same time, I'm giving you more reporting and insights.
And, I'm providing you with more customization options.
It's been really great seeing it evolve over the last couple of months, but can we take a look?
Sure.
So, when you visit the new Admin Center
The first thing you will land on is the new Admin Center homepage.
And as you can see, we have completely redesigned the homepage.
We've looked at what information do you search for the most,
and what are frequent tasks and functionalities that you may need on a regular basis?
Like adding a user or resetting a password.
And the new Admin Center now makes it easy for you to get to these
because they are available directly here on the homepage.
And in most cases when I perform an action like for example when I add a user,
the new Admin Center now shows you more information
and customization options directly here on the right straight from the homepage.
And the homepage now also shows you useful notifications from the message center
integrated straight into your dashboard view.
Can you customize what you see here in terms of the tiles on the screen?
Yes, you can.
That is actually one of the areas that we have really worked hard to incorporate
because frequent tasks may vary from admin to admin.
So to customize the dashboard
simply click on the little edit icon at the top.
And then you can remove tiles
because you may care about billing, but the next admin may not.
And you can also move tiles around so that you have the ones that are most important to you
at the top and easily accessible.
And, you can also add additional cards.
We'll be adding more cards over the next couple of weeks
so that you can actually pin any of the sub-site of the Admin Center directly to your home dashboard.
And then of course that also includes the product specific Admin Centers that you may use
like the SharePoint Admin Center or the Exchange Admin Center.
Ok, so the dashboards really a fast way to navigate the Admin Center
and really do frequent tasks.
What if I'm looking for the deeper functionality
that is in sub menus or deeper into the portal?
So the Admin Center also has a classic navigation menu here on the left
that you can use to get to any of the sub-sites of the Admin Center.
But, the fastest and easiest way to move around in the Admin Center
is actually the search bar at the top.
I know, it's a very tiny search bar but it's very powerful
because basically anything in the Admin Center, I can search for it right from here.
So for example, I can search for a setting like external sharing.
I could equally also search for a site, a group, or a help topic
or also, as you can see for a user.
And in many cases, I can directly take action.
So in the case of the user, I can edit the user
or reset the password straight from the search bar.
Really great to see how quickly you can make these edits.
How do things change from a management perspective?
Is there new functionality or capabilities that the new portal provides?
So the new Admin Center does not only provide you with all the features from the old Admin Center.
We've also added additional functionality and information.
So let's take a look at the user list.
So, the user list now supports infinite scrolls.
I only have a handful of people here on my demo tenant,
but even if you have twenty thousand users
you can now see all of your users in one page
and you can also easily see which license has been assigned to a user.
You can then export that list
into a csv file that provides you with additional information per user.
and when I select the user
I can now see more settings and more properties directly on the right
including group membership for example.
And I can also edit more settings like email forwarding,
automatic replies, or email apps.
And when I select multiple users
I just add our admin here.
Add Molly.
I can now bulk edit more properties including domains,
user roles, and also product licenses.
And that's going to save a lot of clicks,
and from a PowerShell perspective that's what we used to have to do.
Use PowerShell to be able to do some of those bulk activities.
Now we can do that right from the portal.
Exactly, and one other thing that I wanted to show is that at the bottom of the page here,
and also many other pages
we now show you next steps and additional information
which is especially helpful if you are an admin new to Office 365.
Really great to see, and we've made changes to the message center as well, right?
Exactly, let's take a look at the message center.
Because the message center now also provides you with additional functionality.
So you can now filter by message type.
Or, if you select the message you can dismiss the message.
You could even share it with a peer who might not have access to the Office 365 Admin Center
Great, one of the often heard request that we've been getting over the years is just more reporting.
So, can I get to more reports in terms of usage how Office 365 is being used in my organization now?
Yes, so many of you want to better understand how are my end users
using the individual services in Office 365.
Yeah, totally.
The new Admin Center includes a completely new usage reporting dashboard
that shows you at a high level at the top, how many of your users are using Office 365.
And also, which of the individual services they may be using.
You can pivot to different time periods
and you can also modify the report by adding information back in.
This is really great if you want to make informed decisions about
how to train the users, which content to promote,
which workloads to try to deploy and get more usage out of, your user base.
So, if I want to go into the actual workloads like Exchange or OneDrive here,
can we drill into those as well?
Yes, you can.
Each of the main services in the suite, has its own card on the dashboard
which makes it easy for you to understand the activity that is happening within that service.
At the bottom of each card we have a bar graph
that shows you a comparison between the number of active users
and the number of users you have assigned a license to.
This is really a key indicator of adoption for our product.
Then, if you want to drill down further if you want to get additional information per product
you can simply click on one of these cards
or you can choose one of the reports using the drill down menu here at the top.
Let's take a look at the email activity report.
At the top, you can see how the service is being used across your entire organization.
So in our example we can see how many email messages have been sent,
how many email messages have been received,
and how often they have been read.
In the table at the bottom
you can see that information broken down to the individual user.
In the case you're wondering if you're looking at home and that username
that's something that we can actually obfuscate in terms of privacy rules.
We're using live Microsoft data and there's a setting that you can set as an admin as well
if you want to obfuscate your users.
Exactly, and if you want to further analyze or process the data
you can download all of the reports into a csv file.
And one of the really common request that we get is, what if I'm not an admin?
I want to be able to see usage reports.
Maybe I'm the the CIO or somebody who's in the management role
that doesn't have admin access probably for good reasons.
Can we do something there?
Yeah, so the main option that we are currently working on
is a content pack from Power BI.
Which will give you access to rich and interactive Power BI dashboards
that you can easily modify and edit.
You can also easily share.
And the dashboard will show you how communication and collaboration has evolved over time.
And it will also allow you to pivot to different attributes, like for example, region.
So, we're still working on finalizing it
but it will become available in the next weeks
and we will share more information soon.
Really great, so what else can I look forward to in terms of updates of the admin portal?
In terms of other things that we're working on
is to provide you with more reports.
We are currently working on a SharePoint activity report
and also, on an Office 365 groups report.
And on Yammer groups report.
And we're also working on modernizing the product specific Admin Centers.
And I'm providing you with more insights through a new service health dashboard.
One thing to report here as well is that,
if you're used to the older dashboard and the older way
that looked that was presented, you can continue using that through December of this year
to the end of the year.
If you have any apps that take dependencies on the layout of the old Admin Center,
you'll want to look at those as well in terms of modernizing them to really look at the new one.
Or, using the API's that they should be using to call the functions that you want to do.
But, how do people get started using the new admin portal?
Well the new Admin Center is already available to all Office 365 admins.
Simply go to your admin portal and then experience it for yourself.
And if you have feedback please let us know
by using the feedbag widget here at the bottom of the page.
It's really great to see you, thank you Anne.
And of course, you can keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest in tech updates.
That's about all the time we have for today's show.
Thanks for watching and goodbye for now.
Microsoft Mechanics