Learn how business norms are changing and how endpoints affect productivity with Productivity Score

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft 365 Blog articles.

One of the goals of Microsoft Productivity Score is to enable business decision makers and IT to have conversations around driving productivity through insights into how the organization works and how technology enables productivity. In a world where many people are working remotely, we heard from you that these conversations are more important than ever, and that you need to understand the impact this has on your organization. In the Productivity Score private , you have insights into areas like how people communicate, collaborate, and how their device experience and network connectivity contribute to productivity.  To help you get even more insights and drive a more in-depth and relevant conversation in this new world of work, we are happy to share two new features: a special report focused on business continuity, and new features in Endpoint Analytics to help you diagnose and fix common support and performance issues and optimize software for best user experience, on Microsoft Endpoint Manager managed devices.

 

How are your devices contributing to productivity?

 

Of course, the key to understanding and improving your organization's effectiveness at working and collaborating remotely are insights into the technology that underpins these experiences. That's one important area where the Technology Experience side of Productivity Score shines. One of the key categories in Technology Experience is Endpoint Analytics, which helps you understand how your users’ productivity can be impacted by performance and health issues with your endpoint hardware and software, while providing recommended actions to remediate them.

 

Endpoint performance and health issues persist because IT admins don’t have adequate visibility into their root causes and level of impact. The majority of these issues can be attributed to a combination of:

  • Legacy or under-spec’ed hardware
  • Software configurations that aren’t optimized for the end user experience
  • Issues caused by configuration changes and updates

 

To give you the visibility, insights, and actions you need to tackle these productivity killers, we are excited to announce additional enhancements to Endpoint Analytics and make them available in public preview!

 

As we shared in April, Endpoint Analytics currently focuses on three areas to help you address endpoint related user experience problems.  The first area is startup performance, which evaluates the time it takes the PCs in your environment to go from power-on to a responsive desktop.  It gives you a score and a benchmark that allows you to quickly see how you compare to other organizations, along with recommended actions to improve startup times.  Endpoint Analytics also provides recommended software advice to help optimize OS and Microsoft software versions for best user experience.  This includes management and deployment services such as Configuration Manager, Intune, and Autopilot, as well as Azure Active Directory and Windows 10.  Lastly, there are proactive remediation scripts - packages that can detect and fix common support issues on your endpoints, often before users realize there’s a problem.

 

These insights and actions empower you to improve the user experience, lower help desk costs, demonstrate business impact, and make informed device procurement decisions.

 

Endpoint Analytics Startup Performance screenEndpoint Analytics Startup Performance screen

 

We are also happy to announce the public preview supports both Intune and Configuration Manager managed devices. So wherever you are in your management journey, we’ll meet you there. In addition, we’ve simplified the process for enabling endpoint analytics to a single button in the Microsoft Endpoint Management (MEM) admin console, making it even easier and faster to get into the preview.

 

How are people adapting to remote work?

 

Due to the global shift to working remotely, you’ve told us that your organizations’ collaboration norms have changed, but you are not exactly sure how and by how much. The new business continuity report can help you answer this with visibility and insights at an organizational level into these changes. Using data from the Microsoft Graph, the report complements information in Productivity Score and usage analytics with insights into collaboration and work patterns to help you answer questions like “How is ‘business as usual’ changing?” and “How are employees adapting to the disruption of working remotely?”

 

One way to measure how “business as usual” is changing is to analyze how employees are collaborating.  The report provides you with visibility on how the use of in Microsoft 365 has changed, giving you a better picture of the “new normal.” Another way to see this change is to understand employee engagement and measuring how working hours are shifting.  Without the physical separation between home and work, employees may experience difficulty adapting, with the potential for burnout. The report also provides insight into the effectiveness of remote meetings, content collaboration, and employees’ sense of community and belonging.

 

Home page of business continuity reportHome page of business continuity report

 

Want to get started and learn more?

 

To learn more about the business continuity report, check out the documentation at https://aka.ms/bcrps.  The report is rolling out to tenants that have at least 100 active Exchange users over the next few days.  Please note that this report is temporary and will not be a permanent feature of Productivity Score.

 

For details on Endpoint Analytics, visit the public preview page at https://aka.ms/uea.  To enable Endpoint Analytics follow the instructions within the card in Productivity Score or you can visit https://aka.ms/endpointanalytics to take you to the MEM admin console and click the start button.  The list of permissions needed to access Endpoint Analytics can be found at https://docs.microsoft.com/mem/analytics/overview#permissions.

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