MyAnalytics

Microsoft announced that the MyAnalytics app is available to any Office 365 user with an Exchange Online license. Also, Teams and SharePoint signals are soon to be included in the MyAnalytics analysis and dashboard. Expanding the user base is a good idea, but the really big news is the expansion of MyAnalytics to cover a much wider breadth of Office 365 activity.

MyAnalytics is one of the AI components inside Office 365. Part of the E5 plan or available as an add-on, MyAnalytics is usually seen as a dashboard of weekly activity. Its Outlook add-on can highlight commitments you made in email and remind you about other ways you can work smarter. The only problem is that MyAnalytics is handicapped by a lack of signals…

Saying that Teams will reduce the amount of email traffic is one thing; proving it is another. After making the case that Teams reduces email traffic, I set out to prove the case by looking at data in the Office 365 usage reports, Office 365 content pack for Power BI, and third-party reporting software.

Microsoft Workplace Analytics is not a “Fitbit for the enterprise” that you can deploy off-the-shelf to get instantly usable information. Expect to invest considerable time or spend some consulting dollars to make sense of organization dynamics, office politics, and internal friction. All the stuff that makes working in large companies so worthwhile!

Some interesting announcements during the last week informed us about Yammer getting better at compliance and a new Office 365 connector. I’m not so hot on the bots, though. In other news, MyAnalytics has an unexplained love for Internet Explorer and the topic of password trimming and the Office 365 maximum password length caused some confusion – at least for one administrator! And some news about an interesting Exchange 20th anniversary video and a VDI collaboration project between VMware and Microsoft for Skype for Business rounds out the week.

Office 365 Groups occupy a special place in Microsoft’s collaboration strategy. The link-up between Yammer and Groups was the headline news for some, but a lot of other facts were revealed at the Ignite conference, mostly around operational improvements to help tenants manage groups better. Here’s some of what occurred.

There’s lots to hear and learn about with regard to Office 365 at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta this week. All of the product groups are putting their best face forward to impress and amaze customers with what has happened or what will happen inside the service. Here’s some of what I have been hearing.

An exhausting first day at Ignite brought lots of Office 365 news. Surprisingly, the number of Office 365 MAU hasn’t grown, at least not publicly, and confirmation arrived that the Outlook apps now run in the Microsoft Cloud. Lots of focus on using intelligence to repel threats. MyAnalytics arrived, and Exchange 2016 CU3 embraced the Outlook REST API.