Office 365 improves admin experience with these January updates

On the Office blog, Microsoft posted what’s new in the January 2017 update feature list for Office 365 administration. Anne Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team, points out all the new features available in January, including improved setup access and help, a new Yammer device usage report and the introduction of a new OneDrive for Business admin center to all Office 365 customers.

Here’s a look at all the January updates in more detail:

• Access all setup settings in one place—To ensure that you’re getting the maximum value out of Office 365, a new Setup section on the navigation menu now provides access to all setup related settings in one place and gives you improved setup guidance.

• Products page—This new page allows admins to quickly understand how many licenses they have available and which software products are included in each of their subscriptions. Setup guides provide detailed step-by-step guidance for various services—including OneDrive, Office Pro Plus, SharePoint and Hybrid for Exchange Online—and help your organization get up and running quickly.

• Domains page—Admins can update or modify their domain settings at any point and access frequent tasks such as adding a domain, deleting a domain or checking the health of a domain.

• Data Migration page—Provides admins with automation tools and step-by-step guidance to help you migrate your data from on-premises or other cloud services to Office 365, including migrating from your local Exchange server or Google.

• Get more insights on Yammer usage—To provide you with a complete picture of how your organization is using Office 365, we continue to include more reports in the Office 365 admin center. The report shows a breakdown of activity across web and mobile clients, and lets you see the device types commonly used by people in your organization. To access the report, click Usage from the admin center home page and then select Yammer device usage from the dropdown list at the top of the page.

• New OneDrive for Business admin center—To help IT admins better manage sync and sharing capabilities, we are rolling out a new OneDrive admin center. The admin center controls how and from where a user will access the files in OneDrive—across device, location and app. Additional features include sync, storage and device access settings. You can access the OneDrive admin center by clicking Admin Centers and then OneDrive in the left navigation.

In addition to these new features, there is also a new filter on the Active users page that allows admins to view and manage licensed and guest user access.

Over the next few months, the Office team hopes to add more reports for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business users. In addition, Microsoft will make the Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI via general availability and introduce new public APIs to access usage data and add the ability to integrate that data into custom enterprise apps.

Provide your feedback, comments, or suggestions on the new features for the Office team via the feedback link in the lower right corner of the Office 365 admin center.