Microsoft provides new ways to report on usage in SharePoint, OneDrive, Skype, and Yammer

If your organization is using Microsoft’s cloud services, it’s likely that you have some interest in knowing how your users are accessing them. Whether it’s because you need to predict the resources you’ll need as your organization grows and shrinks, or you have security and privacy issues around how your data is accessed and shared, being able to determine usage is vital.

Today, Microsoft announced at the Office blog that some new usage reports are available for a variety of Office 365 services. Specifically, SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, and Skype can now access the following usage reporting tools:

• Activity dashboard (also called reporting dashboard)—Provides you with a high-level overview of how many people in your organization are using Office 365. Each service in the suite, such as Skype for Business and Exchange, has its own tile that surfaces key activity data, making it easy for you to get a quick understanding of the activity within that service. To view detailed information by service or by individual user, simply click the specific tile or use the drop-down menu at the top of the reporting dashboard.
• Email activity report—Enables you to understand email usage, such as send, receive and read activity. It also enables you to monitor trends in email traffic, and can be especially helpful in scenarios such as user migration.
• Office activations report—Shows which users who have been assigned an Office 365 license have signed into Office 365 on at least one device, including a breakdown by device type. This report helps you identify users who have been assigned a license but have not yet activated it, so you can provide assistance as necessary.
• SharePoint site usage report—Provides you with storage consumption details across all your SharePoint sites. The report helps you see activity across sites, how much storage is available per site and how the sites are being used for file storage.
• OneDrive for Business usage report—This report helps you understand storage and sharing activity across OneDrive for Business, including number and size of files stored, in aggregate and per user.
• Skype for Business report—Shows Skype for Business usage, with details such as minutes spent in a Skype Meeting and with breakouts on peer-to-peer activity such as IMs and calls, meetings organized and meeting participation.
• Yammer report—Provides details on Yammer engagement—breaking out Like, Read and Post activities.

The reports are available both en masse and on a per-user level, providing some flexibility in how much detail are provided by reports. Reporting timeframes also vary, with 7 day, 30 day, 90 day, and 150 day options, and reports can be exported to CVS and Excel formats.

You can find additional information at the Compliance Center, and Microsoft promises more reports will become available in the future. Right now, the usage reports are available to Office 365 customers in the U.S., Australia, and Canada, and other regions will start receiving them in May, 2016. Finally, APIs to allow customers to develop their own reports will be coming this fall.