Microsoft Teams Analytics: Why, What and How?

Introduction

The next thing after end-user introduction to Microsoft Teams is to monitor user activities to understand their experience with Teams. By grabbing insights into usage patterns and trends, business leaders can determine the scope of engagement platform and deliver better training. In this blog, we will further delve deeper to know why analytics is a valuable resource and what are the areas that can be measured for strategic decision making. Let’s start –

Understand how your employees are using Teams

Analytics is an excellent way for managers to detect if employees are engaged and continuing to be productive. Activities performed by users on communication platform such as chats, calls, conversations, meetings, file sharing, etc., result in greater profitability to business. Active users on MS Teams indicates high level of focus to work and successful adoption of the platform.

Other than that, analytics can help identify ongoing technical issues with M365 applications. For example, if an employee is still found to be using emails for attaching files instead of sending links via OneDrive, then manager can provide learning materials to that employee on how to send files quickly and easily using OneDrive. Also, analytics help detect security challenges while collaboration. As it provides an end-to-end visibility into the tenant, if something goes wrong such as during external file sharing, managers can immediately act on it to prevent misuse.

Now let us highlight what exactly you want to measure on MS Teams, you should primarily measure to track productivity –

• Teams usage

You need to first know how actively employees from different departments are utilizing the platform. This information will provide you an overview of usage activity in Teams such as total count of active users and channels, guests and messages in each team, etc.

If you are global admin in Microsoft 365, Teams service admin, or Skype for Business admin, you can get this report (Teams usage) from Microsoft Teams admin center.

Furthermore, if you want to get detailed inventory report which includes owner-member details, status, date created, content size, email count, and more on Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, and other workloads together, you can use a third-party app such as TeamsHub.io.

• Coordination activities

This information will give you insights into various types of engagement activities employees are engaged in. For example, you can know how many employees communicate via 1:1 calls, channel messages and private chat messages. You can get this report (Teams user activity) from Microsoft Teams admin center.

Furthermore, if you want to collect user activity report including call count, meeting count, private chat messages, Teams chat messages, etc., across various workloads such as Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, etc., together, you can use TeamsHub.io.

• Device usage

Device usage provides you information about how users connect to Teams. You can use the report to see the users’ devices that are used across your organization, including how many use Teams from their mobile devices when on-the-go. The purpose of this report is to understand device adoption and its effectiveness in engaging employees and improving productivity.

• Most engaged users

Employees who are most active in Teams can be chosen as product evangelists or influencers to motivate others to use Teams. Influencers can easily interact with employees and share their perspectives about Teams to speed up adoption.

You can get this information as ‘Top 10 users’ using analytics in TeamsHub.io.

• Popular teams

Detecting top teams in Teams ecosystem gives you an idea about their success. You can evaluate their approach to understand the platform and strategies of teamwork to recommend others.

You can get this report as ‘Top 10 teams’ using analytics in TeamsHub.io.

• Inactive & orphaned teams

After a project completes, a team becomes inactive as employees don’t use it anymore. Also, employees often create duplicate teams or ownerless teams without a purpose. Hence, it gets critical to free up resources for better optimization by archiving or deleting teams that are unnecessary.

Sadly, MS Teams doesn’t provide a report to view inactive teams that float in your environment. However, you can view all inactive teams along with archived and orphaned (ownerless) teams through an intuitive dashboard offered by TeamsHub.io.

• Total guest users

When your employees are collaborating with external partners, clients or contractors, it is vital to have a good governance in place. Sharing valuable data externally poses security risks such as data theft and mishandling. Tracking guest user count along with files shared outside of organization gives a better control on data and enables you to apply data loss prevention measures proactively.

You can get an overview of total guest count in your environment, teams with guest users and external sharing insights from dashboard in TeamsHub.io.

• Third-party app usage

This report will provide you information regarding third-party apps downloaded by your employees in Teams ecosystem. Third-party apps are easily exploitable and may carry malicious code that can infect your system. Monitoring third-party apps usage can help you identify risky apps and prevent security issues such as shadow IT by configuring firewall settings. Furthermore, understanding user needs, you can provide safer apps as an alternative to unsanctioned apps, that achieve similar business functionality and comply with your organization’s policy.

Improving platform’s usability through automation

MS Teams is a great collaboration tool to keep your employees productive and engaged. However, it doesn’t offer real-time analytics to help you stay ahead of the curve. If you are an agile organization and need to keep an eye on Teams activities almost every minute, using an automation software such as TeamsHub.io offering advanced analytics can be revolutionizing for your business.

Fetching reports in MS Teams is manual and a tedious job as one needs to navigate to multiple admin panels each time. Moreover, for specific reports that are yet not available in Teams, admins are required to write complex PowerShell scripts which is a time consuming and an inefficient way of generating reports. Powered by automation, TeamsHub.io resolves this issue by providing a powerful dashboard where you can visualize Teams statistics in real-time. Using smart reports, you can take data driven and informed decisions best for your business.

To learn more about TeamsHub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo