Getting usage data on M365

The purpose of this blog post is to help Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 Education customers get a view of how their users have adopted the available technology. For a license to be used it relies on three things, the provisioning of the licenses in the appropriate tenant, the allocation of the licenses to a user and then the actual hands-on use of those products and services by an allocated user. The packages that are defined by Microsoft as A3 and A5 are called:

·      Microsoft 365 A3 for Faculty

·      Microsoft 365 A3 for Students

·      Microsoft 365 A5 for Faculty

·      Microsoft 365 A5 for Students

Note: Some License Resellers might have allocated you s a non-unified SKU which means that the packages may be split into their individual components e.g A3 might be split into Office 365 A3 for students, EMS A3 for students and so on.

How many Licenses were purchased?

At a school or school system level you will have a record of your Education Qualified Users (EQU) count for Microsoft 365 Education A3 package or Microsoft 365 A5 package. This will be the number of paid licenses you have access to, and you will have provided this to your reseller at the time of purchase.

‘Student use Benefit’ is the term we use that means most of the products in the package can be used by students for free. When you look at the number of licenses you have access to it will be much higher than your EQU count as the Student use Benefit licenses are usually added into your tenant on a ratio of 1 paid license to 40 student licenses. On top of that, you will also have access to “Free” Office 365 known as the Office 365 A1 package This was also used for non-EQU staff who just wanted access to the online apps.

Note: there may be vastly more student licenses in the tenancy than students, which is as expected as there is a 40:1 ratio available as well as all the A1 licenses for Office you may also have available.

How do you get access to usage data?

Usage is available by tenant and viewed through your M365 admin portal or via a PowerBI report outlined later.

What data is useful? 

All the data and telemetry is useful for you to ascertain trends and areas to support training adoption for for general usage the following are probably the best indicators:

Azure Active Directory Premium: This is used to Login to services and set security posture via Multi Factor Authentication and conditional access. It also logs what apps you have been using and also which apps you have set up to Single Sign On into.

SharePoint and OneDrive: These are good indicators for collaboration and file use in many organisations. It also is a good indicator of how much storage benefit you are using as a part of your subscription.

Office: Data on apps that staff use, for example - Excel, Word and PowerPoint, OneNote, Forms, give an idea of what is being used. It also is a good indicator of student use, which is a free benefit on the back of the paid EQU users. So, for example if you pay for 50 staff your usage of products might be greater than that when you include all the students. You might have 1000 active users of services and the value can be seen as only 50 licenses are paid for. You can also see how many students and staff and activated their own versions of office at home which is a great benefit to them.

Minecraft usage: Azure Active Directory has logging records for Minecraft and other the app authentications to show how many users have accessed Minecraft Education Edition for Teaching STEM subjects and others.

Teams Usage: Your monthly active users on Teams illustrates a good foundation for your collaboration and productivity across your school. It will also be useful to consider the cost of other platforms such as Zoom Enterprise when looking at the potential of Teams. Teams can deliver the equivalent functionality and more.

Intune Usage:  This is a good indicator of how you use Mobile Device Management to support devices for staff and students. You might want to also look at cost savings of other platforms against this that you are saving money on.

PowerBI Dashboard for even more detail:

If you want additional usage information then there are several PowerBI detailed usage dashboards which are available here: Microsoft 365 usage analytics - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs. Microsoft 365 usage analytics gives you access to a pre-built dashboard that provides a cross-product view of the last 12 months and contains a number of pre-built reports. Each report provides you with specific usage insights. User-specific information is available for the last full calendar month. You can access this tool here Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics. If you need to edit your own report you would need one PowerBI Pro license to access this report.

Specific products and tools and how to find the usage:

Minecraft: Education Edition - Minecraft: Education Edition is an app that is deployed to users' devices. It is authenticated by users in Azure Active Directory (AAD) - Azure Active Directory has logging records for Minecraft and other the app authentications:

https://aad.portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/ActiveDirectoryMenuBlade/SignIns

O365 - There are usage statistics on the M365 reports in the admin centre. This has usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, M365 App usage, Forms, Email, Active Users.  Teams' usage, for example can be compared to value for money vs other VC solutions if customers pay for these tools too. Intune usage can also be compared to costs of other tools for Mobile Device Management to see the savings if being used.

In the Admin Centre, go to the Reports > Usage page

Activity Reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs There is a video here to show you how to get this data (you must be the admin user to access this)

Productivity Score

In addition to the raw stats, you might want insights into your organisation's digital transformation journey through its use of Microsoft 365 and the technology experiences that support it. Your organisation's score reflects people and technology experience measurements and can be compared to benchmarks from organisations like yours. This will give you some information on how the products are being used and where more training might be needed

Microsoft Productivity Score - Content collaboration - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Docs

Microsoft Security usage

Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture. You may want to get the most out of current investment or compare value against use in organisations of a similar size. You may also want to compare paid user licenses vs that of other tools or vs students getting some features under as a benefit.

The security score can highlight areas being used and how to improve the security posture. You can also compare your organisation to others of similar size.

It can be found at https://security.microsoft.com/securescore in the Microsoft 365 security center.

Microsoft Security Centre

M365 Security Centre brings together existing security portals (Microsoft Defender, O365 Security and compliance). You may want to compare paid A3 and A5 licenses to savings in other security products or against any incidents that have occurred and been resolved for cost benefit analysis.

This shares telemetry on security and is one pane of glass for security incidents.

Microsoft 365 security center overview - Microsoft 365 security | Microsoft Docs

Third party reporting apps 

There are also some third party reporting tools available for example here: Office 365 Reporting Tool - Office 365 Reports (o365reports.com) if you should need (a demo can be seen here Exchange Online - Birds' Eye View | AdminDroid Office 365 Reporter)