Three Office 365 Improvements that IT Pros Will Appreciate

At the Ignite 2015 conference, Microsoft announced new Office 365 features, with a focus on visibility and control for the IT manager.

“Enhancing these attributes, gives you greater capability to monitor how your organization is running and enable the necessary controls to keep your data safe,” states a blog post reporting the new features.

1. More Visual Dashboards

Microsoft is working to provide this transparency with new Office 365 reporting dashboards that let IT pros see when, how and where end users are consuming services. The dashboard provides an improved user interface and more visual reporting, trend and summary views. Microsoft plans to add similar reporting functionality to Yammer and Office 365 ProPlus, according to the blog post.

2. Enhanced Reporting

Microsoft has also added an Office 365 content pack for Power BI that enables IT pros to use power BI’s reporting capabilities to analyze and create interactive dashboards. “The content pack combines usage reporting data with information from Active Directory (AD) so more combinations of data can be used to gain richer insights into Office 365 service adoption,” states the blog.

Here is an example of a dashboard that you can create with the Office 365 content pack for Power BI:

3. Greater Flexibility in Admin Roles

The new reporting dashboard reports are expected to be rolled out in the third quarter of  this year. The Office 365 content pack for Power BI is expected in the coming months.

Microsoft is also helping companies meet compliance requirements with global workload-specific service admin roles for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online. These new roles limit data access to those who need it to do their jobs. 

There is also now more flexibility in assigning roles. For example, stated the blog, if your Office IT administrator has multiple responsibilities--such as SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online, but not Exchange Online--you can assign multiple roles to that administrator. You are no longer limited to only one role assignment per administrator.

The workload-specific admin roles feature is expected in June.