Chapter 8: Microsoft 365 Analytics

Analytics is an important aspect of every corporate deployment. Among other benefits, it helps organizations understand how services have been deployed and how users are consuming those services. Analytics should be able to reveal complex insights, but they should also be accessible enough to allow organizations to answer important questions right away, such as who is using what, what features or services are the most popular, or which services are not being used at all. Ideally, an analytics solution should also be extensible or accessible using programmatic methods or interfaces such as APIs, which allow data to easily be imported into other applications.

Microsoft 365 Analytics provides this feature set. Besides service usage, these reports can be used to better understand current employee working habits. This will enable report viewers, from IT or Adoption and Change Management (ACM) teams, to be able to leverage continuously updated company...

Learning about Activity reports

Activity reports in Microsoft 365 provide administrators and report viewers with the required data to understand how core components of Microsoft 365 are being used across the organization. To access Activity reports, users should have at least one of the following built-in administrator roles:

• Global admins
• Exchange admins
• SharePoint admins
• Skype for Business admins
• Global reader (with no user details)
• Usage Summary Reports reader (with no user details)
• Reports reader
• Teams Administrator
• Teams Communications Administrator

  Note

  More information about the different administrator roles is available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/add-users/about-admin-roles?view=o365-worldwide.

Activity reports present data about specific activities being executed by users in services, as well as the device profile that is being used to access them. It provides the following reports:

• Microsoft browser...

Understanding Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics

Some organizations may need a more customized or granular view of usage and analytics data. Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics enables users to view and customize reports by using up to 12 months of data. Report data can be published in Power BI, making it available to be shared with other users across the organization.

The Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot, has several tiles showing usage snapshots:

Figure 8.9 – Usage Analytics

Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics is not enabled by default and requires a Power BI Pro license. Usage Analytics can be activated by administrators by performing the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Microsoft 365 admin center (https://admin.microsoft.com).
2. Select Reports | Usage.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Get started from the Microsoft 365 usage analytics card, as shown in the following screenshot:

   Figure 8.10 &...

Exploring MyAnalytics and Viva Insights

Almost every person approaches their work differently. Without dedicating time to taking measurements and understanding how you work, it may not be obvious how you're spending your time. MyAnalytics solves this by providing users with a personal view of their working habits, broken into measurable areas, such as the following:

• Focus: Time for individual work
• Wellbeing: Time disconnected from work
• Network: Relationship with people in your network
• Collaboration: Time spent in meetings and calls

The following screenshot illustrates an example of a MyAnalytics personal view:

Figure 8.16 – MyAnalytics personal view

In addition to details about how users have spent their time and their connections, MyAnalytics provides suggestions for users to help them improve their collaboration, network, and focus time. The MyAnalytics dashboard can be accessed from the following URL: https://myanalytics...

Examining Workplace Analytics

Whereas MyAnalytics is the best tool individuals can leverage to obtain insights on their day-to-day actions, Workplace Analytics provides insights at the organization level. With Workplace Analytics, organizations can review their overall company collaboration and time spent culture by exploring stats such as the following:

• Week in the life: Weekly collaboration
• Meetings Overview: Meetings norms within the organization
• Management and coaching: Collaboration between managers and employees
• Internal networks: Network connections between organization employees
• External collaboration: Organization employees' connections with external users
• Teams collaboration: How employees use Teams for communication and collaboration

The following screenshot illustrates an example of the Week in the life view:

Figure 8.18 – Workplace Analytics

In addition to details about how people are collaborating...

Summary

Microsoft 365 provides organizations with different data views and analyses that can be used to support their adoption strategy for services. In addition to the reports presented in this chapter, Microsoft 365 includes other admin centers, such as SharePoint, Teams, and Security & Compliance, where information related to the usage of those services can be found, including scores that can help organizations understand how their productivity, compliance, and security practices are configured across the organizations as part of Productivity, Compliance, and Secure Score.

In this chapter, we learned about how report viewers can answer important questions regarding their service usage through Activity reports and how Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics reports allow organizations to explore their own users' interactions. In addition to this, we covered how MyAnalytics enables users to understand how they work to improve their working habits, and how Workplace Analytics provides...

Questions

Use the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter. You can find the answers in Chapter 18, Assessment:

1. You are a Microsoft 365 administrator for your organization. As part of a business initiative, you have been asked for both aggregate data and detailed dashboards of where your organization stands concerning Microsoft 365 adoption. What two tools would be most helpful in providing this data?
   1. Microsoft 365 Activity reports
   2. Azure audit logs
   3. Security & Compliance Center audit logs
   4. Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics
   5. Power BI
   6. Excel
   7. SharePoint Site Collection Reports
2. You want to enable users to review their work habit analytics. Which service should you direct them to?
   1. Microsoft 365 Activity reports
   2. MyAnalytics
   3. Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics
   4. Power BI
3. Identify four reporting areas for MyAnalytics.
   1. Focus
   2. Security
   3. Wellbeing
   4. Network
   5. Collaboration
   6. Teamwork
4. Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics can be imported into which two tools or services?
   1. Power BI
   2. Power BI Desktop
   3. Power...