Adoption is everything when it comes to deploying the newest collaboration and communication tools in your enterprise. If you can’t convince your users to access the latest feature sets in your stack, then your investments are simply going down the drain. Fortunately, now you can figure out exactly how much your teams appreciate your IT implementations, with Microsoft’s Usage Analytics reports from 365. The 365 Usage Analytics helps you to see adoption patterns in your workflow, so you can make sure that you’re getting the most out of your IT investment.
Usage Analytics is now available in Power BI, and there are new reports to access within your Microsoft Teams tools too! Though the public preview of Usage Analytics was announced by Microsoft last year, it’s only recently become generally available for the whole world of Microsoft users to use. Let’s take a look at what you can expect from this new feature.
What You Get with Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics
Essentially, Microsoft Usage Analytics Reports is a set of intelligent reports that extract data from your Office 365 Usage so that you can look at four important areas within your enterprise:
- Collaboration
- Activation
- Adoption
- Communication
There are also new Microsoft Teams usage reports that help you to get a glimpse into how your organisation is using their communication and collaboration hub. The Teams and Groups reports are the most recent additions to the Analytics Reports portfolio, intended to help you figure out how your people are collaborating within the workplace. Since the whole point of investing in a collaboration tool like Teams is to bring the workforce together, it makes sense to find out how your teams are taking advantage of their new tool.
The Teams usage report provides an overview into the adoption of Teams, as well as deeper insights into how people are using channels, chat, meetings and more.
Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics Reports
Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics features a host of useful reports, all designed to give leaders a better overview of the way that their company works, and the steps they may need to take to improve productivity. Reports include:
- Product usage reports: This provides an overview of the volume of activities taking place within each service in your communication and collaboration stack (inside Office 365)
- Adoption overview: The adoption overview report offers a summary of all the adoption trends in your space. You can use this insight to find out how well your users are adapting to Office 365 in their communication stack, as well as how individual usage in specific services has changed from month to month. You can see how many licenses you have, and how many of those licenses are active in your organisation
- Collaboration Report: This document shows how the people in your enterprise are using tools like SharePoint and OneDrive to collaborate with each other throughout the workday. You can also use the collaboration report to see how trends are changing from month to month in your organisation
- Communication Report: This analysis helps you to figure out whether your employees prefer to connect with each other through Skype calls, Yammer, Teams, or email. This could be a great way to see whether your move to Teams is on the right track, or whether you need to reconsider your communication options
- Storage use report: If you want to keep track of how much of your storage allowance you’re using, the storage use report is perfect for you. You can use it to track storage for everything from SharePoint and OneDrive, to mailboxes
- Office activation report: You can track Project and Visio activations in your organisation, as well as Office 365 ProPlus, and more. Anyone with an Office license will be able to install products on up to five devices, and you can see which devices your people prefer to use
- Individual service usage reports: Want to see which of your Office 365 services are the most popular within your organisation? The individual service usage reports can help with that, with insights into usage details for Exchange, Teams, Yammer and more.
- Access from Anywhere report: Track where your clients are logging into their Microsoft 365 services for a better view of your business map.
- Individual user activity reports: Check the individual usage of each person within your team with support from active directory attributes.
Keeping Up to Date with the Latest Information
It’s crucial to make sure that you have the latest data in your business if you want to keep track of everything that’s happening with your teams. The majority of the reports available from Microsoft 365 will cover data over the last 12 months, although some charts will show less history depending on how you set up your collection strategy. All reports will eventually build to 12 months of history.
To help ensure that you’re never falling behind, your back-end Office 365 service will regularly refresh on a daily basis, to provide data that’s about 36-72 hours latent from your current date. You’ll need to be a global admin, report reader, or service admin to access usage analytics through the Power BI system.
Finishing Thoughts on Microsoft Usage Reports
Today, it’s safe to say that most companies are using more tools and resources than ever before to keep their employees connected, efficient and productive. However, it’s hard to measure the ROI on your communication and collaboration efforts if you don’t know how people are embracing the latest tools in your stack.
Microsoft believes in providing their customers with the information they need to make confident decisions about communication and collaboration. They even offer alternative methods of accessing usage reports, like Microsoft Graph – the API for Microsoft 365 which you can use to create custom solutions for your data analytics.
The Usage Analytics reports available from Microsoft are just one way for today’s organisations to strengthen their transformation strategies.
Have you delved into the data on your team yet? Let us know about your experiences in the comments below.
