New usage reports for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online
Since the first rollout of the usage activity dashboard in March, we’ve continued our work to provide you with a better reporting experience. Many of the old usage reports have now been migrated to the new admin center. Today, we are happy to announce three new usage reports for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online, which provide you with additional insights about how end users in your organization are using and adopting Office 365.
Here’s a look at these new reports for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Exchange Online:
SharePoint Online activity report
The new SharePoint activity report provides you with details about how users in your organization use SharePoint Online team sites to store and collaborate on files. You can use the report to see which users are active on SharePoint and engage with files stored within team sites—a file is counted as active if it has been created, modified, deleted, shared internally or externally or synced to clients. You can also see which users sync documents back to their local machine and if they share documents internally or externally. In the future, we’ll update the report to reflect additional actions that users can perform in SharePoint, such as page visits. This is a user-centric report complimenting the SharePoint Online team site usage report that you can use to access details per team site.
The usage activity dashboard has been updated with a new card that provides you with a high-level summary of the user file activity within all your SharePoint Online team sites. You can use the card to get a quick understanding of the total number of files across your SharePoint site and how many of these files were edited, viewed, synced (using any client), shared internally or externally. The bar graph shows how many of your users are engaged in file activity in comparison to the number of users you have assigned a SharePoint Online license to. This is a key indicator for adoption and allows you to identify the need for additional end user training and communication.
OneDrive for Business activity report
The new OneDrive for Business activity report enables you to understand which users are using OneDrive in your organization within Office 365. Together, with the already available OneDrive for Business usage report, you now have a holistic view of how your users are leveraging OneDrive to store and collaborate on documents. The report shows how many files a user is actively engaging with across OneDrive accounts in your organization and which users sync files back to their local machine. The report 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.
Mailbox usage report
The new Mailbox usage report—together with the already available email activity report—provides you with a complete picture about how your users are using their mailboxes. You can easily see how many mailboxes are actively being used in your organization, how many items are stored in each user’s mailbox and how much storage space these items take up. The report also allows you to identify which users have a mailbox that is close to reaching the maximum storage limit and might need help to delete or archive items.
A completely new reporting experience
These three new reports are an important step in our mission: Make it easy for you to understand how your users are using—or not using—Office 365, so you can quickly identify issues and areas your users need more training in.
Before creating the new usage activity dashboard, we spent much time talking to customers to fully understand your reporting needs. It became apparent very quickly that you wanted more granular and more actionable reports that provide you with user-level details across all main Office 365 services. Based on your feedback, we revamped the whole Office 365 usage reporting experience and launched the new usage activity dashboard that provides you with an improved reporting experience.
In the new dashboard, we’re consolidating reports to reduce redundancy and make it easier for you to find the information you’re looking for. As a result, you won’t find a one-to-one relationship with the old reports, but improved or brand new reports such as the Office activations, the Yammer activity and the SharePoint activity reports. To make the transition easier, we’ve created a help article that provides you with detailed information on where you can find the information from the old reports in the new admin center.
More to come
In the coming months, we’ll add more reports focusing on Office 365 Groups, Yammer groups, clients used per product, i.e., email or Skype, and Office 365 licenses.
We know you’re all waiting for the Power BI content pack, which will allow you to gain richer insights by enabling you to pivot your organization’s Office 365 usage data with user-level data, like region or department. We’re currently working on the last details, and it will start rolling out later this fall.
Our fall plans also include providing new public APIs that will enable you to programmatically access the usage data and integrate it into custom applications, like a company reporting portal.
Let us know what you think!
Please try the new reports and provide feedback using the feedback button on the site. Or join us in the Admin Center group on the Office 365 Network to let us know any questions. Your input is extremely valuable to us as it helps us to prioritize our work, improve the existing reports and identify additional reporting needs. You can access further details about the reporting dashboard and the new reports on Office Support.
—Anne Michels @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team
