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At Microsoft Ignite, we announced some exciting new Office 365 admin features. We focused on two key themes important to you—the Office 365 IT administrator—visibility and control. Enhancing these attributes, gives you greater capability to monitor how your organization is running and enable the necessary controls to keep your data safe.
Greater transparency with new Office 365 reporting dashboards
To truly understand how your organization is running, you need to see how your end users are consuming the services. Today, we introduced both a new and improved reporting dashboard and an Office 365 content pack for Power BI. With the new reporting dashboard, you get a better user interface with greater visibility into usage across Office 365 services. The new reporting dashboard provides a much more visual reporting experience with trend and summary views. To get more details, simply select the desired reporting tile for more detailed reports. We have plans to add more reports for additional Office 365 services including Yammer and Office 365 ProPlus in the future.
We also showed an early preview of an Office 365 content pack for Power BI. The Office 365 content pack enables you to use the powerful reporting and analytics capabilities of Power BI to analyze and create interactive dashboards. The Office 365 content pack for Power BI 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.
Here is an example of a dashboard that you can create with the Office 365 content pack for Power BI:
With both the in-product Office 365 usage reports and the Office 365 content pack for Power BI, you now have more tools at your disposal to monitor how your users are using the service and how you can maximize the ROI. Rollout for the new reporting dashboard reports is targeted to begin in Q3 2015. Availability of the Office 365 content pack for Power BI is expected in the coming months.
More control with workload-specific admin roles
With the greater visibility, your organization may also want to enable more control on how your organization’s data is being accessed by administrators. We are excited to introduce new global workload-specific service admin roles for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online. These new roles provide your organization with more options to improve compliance by limiting access to data to only those who need it. If your organization manages your Office 365 IT administrators according to workloads, then this feature is for you.
In addition, there is now more flexibility in assigning roles. If your Office IT administrator has multiple responsibilities i.e. SharePoint Online and Skype for Business Online responsibilities but not Exchange Online, you can assign multiple roles to that administrator. You are no longer limited to only one role assignment per administrator.
With the new workload-specific admin roles and the ability to select multiple roles, we aim to provide you more options to select the right administrator permissions and control who has access to your data. The rollout for workload-specific admin roles is targeted for this June.
Better manage your organization
With the new and improved Office 365 reporting dashboards and new workload-specific admin permissions rolling out over the next few months, you will gain significantly more visibility and transparency into your organization and more controls to limit access of your data to better manage your organization.
Stay tuned to Office Blogs and the Office 365 Roadmap for more information.
—Lawrence Chiu, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 team.
Source: http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/05/whats-new-in-office-365-administration-from-microsoft-ignite/
