Microsoft Announces New Usage Reports for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online

Microsoft is rolling out new usage reports for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online that provide additional insights about how end users are using and adopting Office 365. The new reports were announced in a blog posted by the Office 365 Team.

According to Microsoft, the three new reports will make it easier for organizations to understand how individuals are using or not using Office 365 so that issues and areas users need more training in can be identified.

The Office 365 team says it plans to add more reports focusing on Office 365 Groups, Yammer groups, clients used per product, such as email or Skype, and Office 365 licenses.

Microsoft is also working on the Power BI content pack, which will allow organizations to gain better insights by pivoting an organization’s Office 365 usage data with user-level data, like region or department and  it will start rolling out later this fall. Additonal plans for the fall include providing new public APIs that will enable organizations to programmatically access the usage data and integrate it into custom applications, like a company reporting portal.

The new SharePoint activity report provides details about how individuals are using SharePoint Online team sites to store and collaborate on files, enabling visibility on  which users are active on SharePoint and engage with files stored within team sites and which users sync documents back to their local machine and if they share documents internally or externally. In the future, Microsoft says it will update the report to reflect additional actions that users can perform in SharePoint, such as page visits to complement the SharePoint Online team site usage report that provides details per team site.

The usage activity dashboard has also been updated with a new card that provides a high-level summary of the user file activity within all of an organization’s SharePoint Online team sites to support a quick understanding of the total number of files across a SharePoint site and how many of these files were edited, viewed, synced (using any client), shared internally or externally.

The second new report, the OneDrive for Business activity report, enables visibility into which individuals are using OneDrive in an organization within Office 365. Together, with the already available OneDrive for Business usage report, Microsoft says, this provides a holistic view of how users are leveraging OneDrive to store and collaborate on documents. The report, which shows how many files a user is actively engaging with across OneDrive accounts in an organization and which users sync files back to their local machine, is helpful to identify users that might need additional training and communication around how OneDrive can help them to store files and collaborate with others, or users that need support.

And finally, the new Mailbox usage report, added to the already available email activity report, provides what Microsoft describes as a complete picture about how individuals are using their mailboxes, with insight into how many mailboxes are actively being used in an organization, how many items are stored in each user’s mailbox and how much storage space these items take up. The report also identifies which users have a mailbox that is close to reaching the maximum storage limit and might need to delete or archive items.

For more information about the new reports, go here. 

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