August 8, 2022
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4
min read
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Managing your Office 365 environment is bigger than just securing your business-critical data – although that is an essential element. One way to quickly identify your team is to get the most ROI of your investment through Office 365 Admin Center Activity Reports.

For example, you can quickly and efficiently identify who is making regular use of a given service and is meeting quotas, as well as who within your organization, may not need an advanced Office 365 license like E5 at all.

These reports provided by Microsoft will empower you to gain a high-level view of what users within your organization are getting the most value from, as well as the ability to dive deep into individual product-level reports, which offer much more granular insight into how and the frequency with which team members are using specific O365 apps.

For example, Activity Reports can offer a big picture look at email traffic within your organization, and you can also dive deep into user trends and individual usage patterns within your company with the related widget.

Available Activity Report Types in Office 365

Depending on your subscription level, M365 offers activity reports on all manner of features within your tenant. These reports include everything from email usage to OneDrive utilization to SharePoint usage and more.

For a comprehensive listing of available report types, you can refer to the M365 documentation on the topic.

Rightsizing Licensing in Office 365

One of the most direct benefits of tracking user activity in Office 365 applications is the ability to identify and act on underutilized E5 licenses.

Underutilized licenses are those that have been assigned to users who are either

  • no longer active within the system
  • who may not require the level of license they have been assigned according to their specific usage patterns

By automating the process of generating these reports, your organization can potentially save a tremendous amount of money by reassigning underutilized licenses.

Or simply holding them in a reserve pool to be assigned at a future date to new users who need them.

Increasing User Engagement in Office 365

Office 365 offers a wealth of resources that can help your organization to be as productive as possible.

That said, sometimes users are reluctant to use certain features that they aren’t yet familiar with, which constitutes an underutilization of the services provided.

By leveraging M365 activity reports, your organization can surface any underutilization of specific M365 features that can be mitigated through internal training opportunities.

Tools such as Microsoft Viva for M365 training, as well as all sorts of other employee training tools.

Managing Storage Quotas in Office 365

Another valuable insight that can be gained through the analysis of activity reports is the available storage in features such as mailboxes.

When these reports are automated, they can provide a means by which additional storage can automatically be allocated according to specific rules defined by your IT team when users are approaching defined storage quotas.

Alternatively, an alert can be sent to the user or administrator to inform them of limited storage remaining, which can prompt the user to archive items as needed.

Understanding Collaboration Levels in Office 365

In addition to gaining insight into individual users’ usage of specific M365 applications, you can also get valuable insight into the degree of collaboration between and amongst departments within your organization by reviewing user events in M365 applications like OneDrive.

You can also review such employee behaviors as meetings created and meetings accepted, to identify any potential communication gaps within your company.

If, for example, your marketing department has a defined target of increasing collaboration with your R&D team, you can easily get a high-level view into the degree of collaboration taking place through these reports.

How CoreView Can Help

CoreView offers organizations pre-built reports covering a wide variety of subjects. Most of these reports are delivered using a columnar (table) format, which makes reading them simple.

CoreView's Inactive guest users dashboard

Moreover, it is simple to automate the generation of reports with CoreView provides a means to simple automation of these reports.

CoreView's Schedule Settings dashboard

This allows longitudinal insight into organizational behaviors that will help you to create and execute high-level, interdepartmental organizational objectives informed by your employees’ specific behaviors within M365. Want to see our reports in action? Schedule your demo today.

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Created by M365 experts, for M365 experts.