Even before the events of early 2020, many organizations and much of the workforce were realizing the benefits of telecommuting. With a changing world, even the most die hard “butts in your seat” workplace cultures have had to adapt. For some, trusting their flock to work efficiently and productively with little oversight can be a source of anxiety. While the shift to working remotely may take some getting used to for everyone, a net positive in productivity is usually the result.
So, your staff is no longer right outside your office doors and the conversations in the break room are no longer there to give you insight. How do you measure your staff productivity? Luckily, Microsoft M365 Usage analytics allow us to pull data from Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Yammer and more into a sortable, consumable report.
Prerequisites
Licensing
To install the M365 Usage Analytics app, you will need at least 1 Power BI Pro License. If you would like to demo the app, you can sign up for a free Power BI Pro trial here.
If the report is shared with additional users, they will also need a Power BI Pro License to view the report.
Identities
All the sorting done by the M365 Usage Analytics app is done by Azure AD user object attributes. It is recommended that you make sure the following attributes are populated and current.
- Company
- Department
- Country
- State
- City
Tenant ID
To connect your organizations data, you will need your Tennant’s ID. The tenant ID can be easily obtained from the overview page in Azure Active Directory. Directions to obtain your tenant id are included in this post.
Enable Power BI Reporting For Your Tenant
In order for Power BI to access your organizational data, you must enable Power BI reporting with-in your Tenant.
Enabling Power BI Reporting
- The link below will bring you to the Services and Add-ins configuration page with in the O365 Admin Portal.
- Click on “Reports”, select the option to “Make report data available to Microsoft 365 usage analytics for Power BI” and click “Save Changes”
- Selecting the option for “Display anonymous identifiers instead of user, group, or sites names in all reports” will obscure user identifiable data in the reports. This reporting option will still allow you to discern organizational trends without specific user data.
Retrieving Your Tenant ID
- Navigate to Azure Active Directory overview page.
- Sign in with an appropriate admin account.
- The Tenant ID is located near the top of the page.
Installing the M365 Usage Analytics App
- Navigate to the Power BI Portal and sign in with a global admin account which has a Power BI Pro license.
https://Power BI.microsoft.com/
- The app automatically creates its own workspace upon installation. For this reason we can begin by clicking “My Workspace” and then “Get” under “Discover Content >> My Organization”.
- The easiest way to find the app is to search for “usage” in the search bar. Once you have found the Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics app, click “Get in now”.
- The next screen allows you to review the app’s privacy policy, and terms of service as well as some additional info about the app. Once you are satisfied, click install.
- After waiting for Power BI to Install the app, click the apps icon.
- The next Screen gives three options. You can populate the app with sample data before connecting to your organization’s analytics, explore the workspace created along with the app or connect your organizations data. If your comfortable pulling in your organizational data, click “Connect” under “Connect your data”
- For Power BI to find you data, you will need to input you Tenant ID. Instructions on finding your tenant ID can be found above. Enter the Tenant ID in the field and click “Next”
- The next field allows you to select the privacy level for data received from you Tennant. You can find additional information on each privacy level here. Once you have determined the appropriate privacy level, change the “Authentication method” to “OAuth2” and click “Sign In”
Scheduling Refreshes
By default, the dataset create does a one time pull. To see updated data each day or week, you will need to configure the refresh scheduler. You can also configure alerting on refresh failures. When the app was installed, a new workspace was created to house the report and dataset. To access the refresh settings, we will first find and access the workspace.
- Click on “Workspaces” on the left had blade and select the “Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics” workspace.
- Click on “Datasets” with in the workplace ribbon and expand the ellipses under “Actions”. From the drop-down menu, select “Settings”
- Expand “Schedule Refresh”. Make sure the radio button for “Keep your data up to date” is turned on. Configure your preferred refresh interval (Daily or Weekly). You can add additional times if you would prefer multiple refreshes per day. If you wish to alert on failed refreshes, you can configure the notification settings. Click apply when finished.
Viewing the Report
- From the workspace dashboard, select “Reports” from the ribbon and click “Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics”.
- You know have all your data in a prebuilt report for consumption.
Sharing the Report
- If you wish the share the report with others, from the “Reports” page, click “Share” in the upper right-hand corner.
Note: Any user the report is shared with will need a Power BI Pro license to view the report
- From the share dialogue, you have the option to add multiple recipients and dictate whether those recipients can share the report. Deselect the “Allow recipients to build new content…” radio button if you do not wish recipients to have access to the underlying dataset.
Summary
Obviously, there is a lot more to cover with the Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics app and Power BI. I hope to cover manipulating the dataset and building customized reports in a future blog post. Thank you for reading!