Microsoft introduced a new “reporting portal” that’s just recently been rolled out to the public.

Among several fresh features, the reporting portal is now showing the different user’s activity within the Office 365 Admin Center itself. This Admin Center is the portal Microsoft has been pushing for their subscribers to use for about a month now.

And just so you’re clear, the previous management portal has now been replaced by the Office 365 Admin Center.

Inside the reporting portal, data is displayed through charts and graphs that is representative of the Office 365 user activity. The various types of user activity data you can find here are:

• Active Office 365 subs
• Email activity of the users
• The user count of those that have activated Office so far

What’s to come-

This coming month Microsoft plans to make this reporting portal available to the US and Canada Office 365 subscribers. After it has gone public, Microsoft states they will be giving the ability to track OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype, and Yammer use to those using the reporting portal.

Soon after, Power BI will be expanded upon by Microsoft to combine your own Office 365 data with your user’s information. This effectively gives companies the ability to leverage Power BI to analyze user data; which will be a potent tool.

This will give insight into how users are actually using Office 365 services. You can use comparisons through different geographic regions or even across departments in the same company.

And after this summer, Microsoft will allow companies that are subscribed to Office 365 to use API’s that transport the data reports into customer applications. Additionally the data contained in these reports can also be sent to Excel through CSV files to be read by other analytical tools.

Microsoft also mentioned several other not-so-specific points about the reporting portal. The portal will be able to take an in-depth look at each individual user’s activity but it will show them as “anonymized” information so that no privacy breaches are made and compliance standards are met.

Additionally, if you want to look at a custom date range to measure a trend, you have that capability. For now, the suggested options are 1 week, 1 month, 2 months, and 3 months.

Old Reports Are Soon Gone

Now that the new reporting portal has hit the market, the old “classic” reporting portal is going to be completely gone soon. This is what Microsoft said about the topic:

And no worries, the reports in the old admin center will be available until an equivalent report has been added to the new report portal. In the new portal, we’re consolidating reports to reduce redundancy and to make it easier for you to find the information you’re looking for. You won’t find a 1:1 replication of the old reports. Instead, you will have access to improved new reports that give you even more insights.

Microsoft is stating that the old report data will stick around in the new portal, however the old methods of reporting will be done away with and replaced by the new system.

See more about what we can do with Office 365 here.