Microsoft's new service will help organizations analyze how their employees are using workplace apps

Microsoft today announced a new service called Office 365 Usage Analytics that will be generally available in early 2018. Organizations can deploy number of apps and services for their employees, but they really won’t have information on how their employees are actually using those apps and services. Office 365 Usage Analytics is the solution to this problem, it will help organizations to analyze and visualize service-wide usage data of Office 365 apps and services in Power BI. It will include new metrics on teamwork and collaboration, usage data for Microsoft Teams, Yammer Groups and Office 365 Groups, and more.

There’s a new “Social Collaboration” area inside Usage Analytics that will offer insights about how people work in teams, and especially how they use Microsoft Teams to do so. Also SharePoint reports will be improved with activity information from all site types and additional site activity information like page views. There’s also Advanced Usage Analytics that allows IT Admins to access more granular usage data to perform advanced analytics on organization’s Office 365 usage data.

• Leverage a scalable and extensible solution template to transmit the Office 365 usage dataset into your Azure datastore
• Dynamically join usage data with complete user metadata from Azure Active Directory
• Bring your own user metadata – i.e. as a csv file – to enrich the dataset with your organization’s context or any other LOB data
• Stand up an end-to-end solution in minutes including data extraction, Azure SQL, Azure Analysis Services (optional), and Power BI reports
• Access usage data at the granularity of your choice such as daily, weekly, or monthly.

Learn more about Office 365 Usage Analytics here.