Microsoft has announced that it will be making its new tool for visualisation, which it is calling Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in Power BI, available to enterprise IT professionals in preview form.
This solution has been created as a way of assisting end users when it comes to the viewing of Office 365 usage, and it is available to all those who have Office 365 tenancies, free of charge. Those who wish to explore the preview version can do so by activating it via the Admin Centre portal for Office 365 – deploying the page called ‘Usage Reports’. However, it can only be activated by a product administrator or a global administrator for Office 365.
According to Microsoft, the process of data collection will require a period of 2-48 hours to complete and after the solution has been turned on, it will offer usage data for Office 365 that covers a period of one year, enabling IT professionals to analyse it. Although the product name may suggest otherwise, it is not necessary to have Power BI licencing to access Office 365 Adoption Content Pack in Power BI – all it requires is a Power BI account, which is free to sign up for.
Some may be thinking that this solution was already available, due to the fact that the software giant launched a product called the Power BI Content Pack during 2016, which was also created for the purpose of displaying data usage within Office 365. The difference between these two tools is that the new one is a service that is more prepackaged, which should make actually using it easier. There is also the option for IT professionals to make customised changes to it that suit the individual needs of the company by which they are employed.
Those using this new tool will find four primary dashboards: the first of these, called Understanding Adoption, displays data concerning adoption trends for Office 365 – such as how many users with active licences there are within an organisation. The second, called Communication, reveals what services are being deployed for this purpose – e.g. Yammer, Skype or Exchange. The third, called Collaboration, provides data on how services like SharePoint and OneDrive for Business are being deployed within an organisation. The last of them, Activation, provides data on the number of Visio Pro, Project Pro and Office 365 ProPlus activations, with those on mobile devices included.
Departmental and regional Office 365 usage can be displayed via this Adoption Content Pack, with its reports containing data filters. Its dashboards can also be shared – both internally and externally – by the IT professionals who will be managing it. Microsoft considers the tool to be a means for understanding Office 365 usage throughout an enterprise.
This sounds like it could be a valuable service for enterprises that deploy Office 365 on a regular basis. You can learn more about how the services we supply can be of value to your company by getting in touch with WM Reply right away.