Today, the Office 365 team announced the limited preview of a new integration with Microsoft Power BI. Using Power BI, Office 365 Admins will have better insight into how your group utilizes Office 365. There are four new Power BI dashboards available through the Office 365 admin center: Adoption, Communication, Collaboration, and Activation.
- 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.
- 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 the average amount of time spent using Skype. The dashboard also shows which client apps are used to read email or to use Skype.
- 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 Office 365 adoption content pack with Power BI also has additional reports available to Office 365 admins; Yammer Usage, Skype for Business Usage, OneDrive for Business Usage, and SharePoint Usage Office 365 Top User reports. Current Office 365 customers can get access to the limited preview of the Office 365 adoption content pack with Power BI tools by emailing the Office 365 team and include your tenant ID.
Act fast because the sign-up period ends on October 16, 2016. Processing your request could take an additional 2-3 weeks. After which point the Office 365 team will send you an email with additional instructions. Otherwise, the Office 365 adoption content pack with Power BI tools will become available to all Office 365 customers that opt-in by the end of December 2016 or early January 2017.
