Reports are incredibly useful to gain an understanding of the work that is being done in your collaboration Workspaces. Reports also allow you to manage performance. If you could see critical Insights about your Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams environment, you would be able to drive intelligent collaboration, compliance, and security. Orchestry’s new Actionable Insights capability goes beyond Microsoft’s standard reporting functionalities and empowers users to get a complete understanding of their digital workplace all within one single tool.
Microsoft Teams & SharePoint Online Usage
As you start creating teams in Microsoft Teams and sites in SharePoint, you must manage the sprawl creep. Otherwise, you may end up with several Workspaces that are either dormant or temporarily set up that add no value to your project and its users. Therefore, it’s necessary to regularly audit all the Workspaces to ensure there is smooth communication, free of confusion.
The moment you set up a system that captures this information and shares insights on usage, governance, and activity, you can gain a better grasp of your business, plan for ways to weed out existing operational challenges, and set your employees up for success.
Microsoft 365's Out of the Box Reporting Options
Within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, it gets difficult to understand what is being used or what has been used in the environment. Also, Microsoft 365 doesn’t fully capture and share insights about the usage of workspaces in a consolidated manner. Users often find themselves bringing in reports across multiple Admin centers. Another option is to run PowerShell scripts or Power Automate to build custom reports. But even on using PowerShell scripts, the reports are not presented in a way that you can extract information out of.
Leveraging Actionable Data & Insights
Actionable Insights are a series of reports created by Orchestry, based around common questions and information that administrators require to help them make more informed decisions about their collaborative Workspaces. Orchestry understands the challenges associated with integrating applications and managing the lifecycle of content, document, and Workspaces within the Microsoft 365 environment. To help you overcome such challenges, Orchestry provides a very intuitive interface for users to understand their Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites.
Orchestry has identified that customers and partners need not only a simple and beautiful way of representing what is going on in their environment but also an understanding of how they got there. Questions like ‘which teams grew over time’ and ‘why is a certain team active after being dormant’ are not addressed by Microsoft 365. So, Orchestry brings to you very specific insights on how a team and site has evolved over time in terms of members, users, owners, etc.
Image: Workspace Insights by Guests
By capturing insights around usage and activity, Orchestry provides you with trends and patterns of how members interact with Workspaces. These insights are compiled both on an individual workspace level and an aggregated report level to help you understand the bigger picture.
Here are some key areas that Orchestry monitors across applications and assets:
- MS Teams teams – activities, conversations, replies, and reactions.
- Microsoft 365 Groups – outlook conversations and outlook reoccurring meetings as part of the group mailbox.
- SharePoint site – changes in total storage size, file reads, file writes, page views, and page writes.
At the moment, Orchestry is launching the new Actionable Insights capability with six categories of Reports that support nineteen different ways of viewing your workspace metrics. But that’s not all, going forward Orchestry will be adding to this with more comprehensive reports.
Image: Reporting Options for Workspace Insights
The General Reports include an ‘All Workspaces’ report that gives insights on all MS Teams teams, SharePoint sites, and Groups by creation and an ‘Inactivity’ report that tells people the last time a collaboration asset was used.
The ‘Inactivity‘ report is among the most powerful reports providing organizations a compelling understanding of what is going on in their Microsoft 365 collaboration Workspaces. In terms of MS Teams teams, any conversations, reactions to teams’ messages are all recorded as metrics and in the case of Microsoft Groups; all group conversations and even calendar entries are tracked. Users can even get insights on documents created, edited, or viewed on SharePoint sites.
Image: Sorting Workspace Insights by Inactivity
Orchestry also allows users to view reports with respect to the ‘Archival Policy‘ applied to the collaboration assets or the ‘Governance Policy‘ configured for each workspace.
The ‘Activity’ report options enable a view of how much data storage a Workspace is using, the number of documents stored in a Workspace, or the number of group conversations. A lot of these are focused on subtle aspects of a Workspace but are extremely useful when it comes to managing a collaborative environment.
Just looking at the various insight reports is a good way to understand what is going on, but if you need to dive deeper, Orchestry has Workspace details that you can tap into with just one click. Not only does it contain static information, but also historic information.
Image: Complete Workspace Dashboard for Microsoft Teams within Orchestry
You can see the various counts of owners, documents, guests and so much more. You can hover over the graphs and see the historical information over time, to see how each aspect has evolved. The Lifecycle Tab on the upper right corner captures the activity taking place in the workspace, broken down between Team, Outlook, and SharePoint. Orchestry even allows you to assign archival policies through here. The Workspace Links provide quick and easy access to all the resources that are a part of the Group, Teams Admin Center, and Group Administration through Azure AD.
The Impact of Actionable Insights
Orchestry adds value to your MS Teams and Microsoft 365 environment with this powerful functionality as none of these reporting options are available out of the box. Even though PowerShell scripts are commonly used, they do not provide actionable data for management.
In addition, Orchestry reports are created in real-time and are updated on a 24-hour basis, giving you the most recent statistics. Not to mention the super user experience that Orchestry provides is unmatched by any other reporting tool out there.
Moreover, these insight reports also store historical information that can be accessed easily whenever needed.
Orchestry is also working on a few other reports that will be made available after the launch:
- Orphaned Workspaces: this report will show all Workspaces that have no active owners in Azure Directory.
- Workspaces with External Shares: any Workspace with external sharing links in the SharePoint site will be displayed in this report.
- Workspace where a User is an Owner or Member: crucial from an offboarding perspective as administrators can know if someone who is no longer with the organization or is exiting the organization owns a workspace or not.
In case you are thinking about security already, don’t worry, Orchestry thought this through and is using Azure Cosmos DB in the appropriate regions for data storage. The most important thing to know is that Orchestry is not storing any raw data and only metadata and aggregated data are kept.
Users can rest assured that all best practices are applied with encryption at transport and at rest. Also, customers with strict data requirement rules can store it in their own Azure instance.
Watch the official public release of ‘Orchestry’s Actionable Insights & Comprehensive Lifecycle Management’ to learn more: https://www.orchestry.com/event/orchestry-lifecycle-management-official-public-release/
Unlock the power of Orchestry and gain much greater capabilities than what standard Microsoft 365 OOTB features can offer you. Get in touch with us at hello@orchestry.com and get FREE ACCESS to Orchestry to experience the incredible functionalities for yourself!