Announcing the preview of the Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI

Understanding how your users adopt and use Office 365 is critical for you as an Office 365 admin. It allows you to plan targeted user training and communication to increase usage and to get the most out of Office 365. The usage reports in the new Office 365 admin center are a great starting point to understand usage. However, many of you have shared feedback with us that you want the ability to further analyze your data to understand how specific departments or regions use Office 365 or which products are used the most to communicate.

To provide you with richer and more personalized usage insights, we’re combining the intelligence of the usage reports with the interactive reporting capabilities of Power BI. The new Office 365 adoption content pack enables you to visualize and analyze Office 365 usage data, create custom reports and share the insights within your organization and pivot by attributes such as location and department. Today, we’re announcing that a limited preview of the adoption content pack is now available for Office 365 customers.

announcing-the-preview-of-the-office-365-adoption-content-pack-in-power-bi-1

Richer adoption, collaboration and communication insights

Office 365 is all about enabling users to be more productive and to communicate and collaborate more effectively. With the adoption content pack, admins can gain deeper insights into how their users leverage Office 365 to communicate and collaborate and how it has evolved over time. This helps understand where admins need to focus user training and communication going forward.

The dashboard is split up into four areas: Adoption, Communication, Collaboration and Activation. Admins can access detailed dashboards for each area by clicking any of the metrics.

Adoption report—Helps you understand how your users have adopted Office 365 as well as how usage of the individual services has changed month-over-month. Admins can easily see how many users they have assigned a license to, how many users actively use the products and how many are first time users or returning users that use the product each month. This helps admins identify the products for which additional user training might be needed to increase adoption.

announcing-the-preview-of-the-office-365-adoption-content-pack-in-power-bi-2

Communication report—Shows admins how users use Office 365 to communicate. The dashboard includes a communication activities report that provides details about how the usage of different communication methods—such as email or Yammer message posts—has changed over time allowing admins to understand how their users adopt new ways of communication. Additional metrics include average number of emails sent, average number of Yammer posts read and average amount of time spent using Skype. The dashboard also shows which client apps are used to read email or to use Skype.

announcing-the-preview-of-the-office-365-adoption-content-pack-in-power-bi-3

Collaboration report—Gives you the ability to see how people in your organization use OneDrive and SharePoint to store documents and collaborate with each other and how this is changing. Admins can also see how many users share documents internally versus externally.

Activation report—Helps you understand Office 365 ProPlus, Project and Visio activations. Admins can see total activations across users, number of users that have activated the products, number of devices they have activated them on and the type of device.

The adoption content pack provides you with additional reports that admins can access by clicking the tabs at the bottom of the site including the following reports:

  • Yammer Usage report—Useful for organizations that are in the process of rolling out Yammer or are focused on increasing usage. The report provides helpful information about how various parts of your organization adopt Yammer as a form or communication including how many people post messages, how many consume content by liking or reading a message and how new user activation has changed over time.
  • Skype for Business Usage report—Provides a consolidated view of Skype activity as well as with details about how many users leverage Skype to connect with others through peer-to-peer messages and how many communicate their ideas by participating or organizing video conferences.
  • OneDrive for Business Usage report—Shows admins how users leverage OneDrive to collaborate with others in new ways. They can easily see how many users use OneDrive to share files and how many utilize it mostly for file storage. The report also includes information about how many OneDrive accounts are actively being used, and how many files are stored on average.
  • SharePoint Usage report—Shows how SharePoint team sites and groups sites are being used to store files and for collaboration. The report also includes information about how many SharePoint sites are actively being used, and how many files are stored on average.
  • Office 365 Top User report—Enables admins to identify Office 365 power users and the individual products they are using. Power users can often help to drive product usage by sharing their experience about how they use the products to get their work done faster and more efficiently.

Create, customize and share reports

The dashboard is just a starting point to quickly get started with the adoption content pack and to interact with the data. As every organization has unique needs, we’ve ensured that admins can query the data to help you answer specific questions about your organization and create a personalized view. For example, you can filter to show only one of the products or adjust the time frame of the reports. By default, most reports provide data for the previous six months. Admins can also create additional reports or a new dashboard that show specific views.

The adoption content pack also allows you to easily share the usage reports with anybody within your organization who might not have access to the Office 365 admin center. In addition, the adoption content pack combines usage data with the Active Directory (AD) information of your users and enables you to pivot by AD attributes such as location, department or organization.

Sign up for the preview program

The limited preview of the adoption content pack is available for Office 365 customers today. To get access to the content pack, please send an email to O365usagePowerBIPreview@service.microsoft.com and include your tenant ID. Sign-up closes October 16, 2016and space is limited—so please sign up now. After we have prepared your data (it can take 2-3 weeks), you will receive an email with instructions.

The adoption content pack will become available for all customers to opt in by the end of December.

Let us know what you think!

Please try the new features and provide feedback in email to O365usagePowerBIPreview@service.microsoft.com. And don’t be surprised if we respond to your feedback. We truly read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure the Office 365 administration experience meets your needs.

—Anne Michels @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team

 

The post Announcing the preview of the Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI appeared first on Office Blogs.