Microsoft Introduces New Adoption Score Tool to Measure People and Technology Experiences

Microsoft has launched a new tool to help IT admins understand and optimize Microsoft 365 usage patterns within their organization. Adoption Score replaces the controversial Productivity Score dashboard and brings new features designed to support managers in generating better results from their teams.

“We are pleased to introduce Adoption Score, a set of metrics and tools for Microsoft 365 admins and IT leaders to improve the everyday experiences of their workforce and to help organizations get the most out of their investment in Microsoft 365,” Microsoft explained. “The anonymized metrics in Adoption Score help IT admins understand and optimize Microsoft 365 usage patterns in support of their digital transformation journey.”

Microsoft Adoption Score brings a new Time Trends feature that helps administrators understand historical insights data across the organization. It provides metrics, insights, and recommendations to measure people and technology experiences.

The people experiences show how the organization uses Microsoft 365 capabilities to improve communication, content collaboration, mobility, teamwork, and meetings. Adoption Score provides metrics for these categories across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint, PowerPoint, Word, Yammer, Skype, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote.

Moreover, the technological experiences give insights into areas that can help to improve user experiences with Microsoft 365 apps. Adoption Score measures the experiences across three categories endpoint analytics, network connectivity and Microsoft 365 apps health.

Microsoft Adoption Score ensures user privacy

In 2019, Microsoft released a Productivity Score feature that was heavily criticized by privacy advocates. They warned that it’s a workplace surveillance tool that lets organizations use Microsoft 365 to track the activities of individual employees.

With this release, Microsoft has reiterated its commitment to protecting user-level privacy. The company says that “no one in a customer’s organization can use Adoption Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365.” This approach helps to maintain privacy while enabling IT admins to measure and manage their organizational adoption of the Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Microsoft Adoption Score is available to customers as a part of their existing commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions. However, IT Pros with the Global Administrator role can access it in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and you can find more details on this support page.