Top 5 Office 365 Reports in Nova

Make better decisions with detailed Office 365 reports

More data means less guessing and more data-driven decisions.

With Quadrotech’s Office 365 reporting software, you can gain access to an extensive, customizable library of Office 365 reports. You can see whether your users with E5 licenses really use them, or if you’ve received twice as much inbound spam email last week in comparison to this week.

You can also see a fully itemized list of inactive or under-used resources in your environment,  so you can clean up OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, etc.

Nova gives you access to detailed Office 365 reports you can use to:

• Monitor service adoption
• Manage licenses granularly
• Track mail flow
• Configure security settings
• Set permissions
• Optimize storage

In this article, we’ll run through the top 5 Office 365 reports that are available to Nova subscribers.

1) License Overview

This report gives you a quick look at how Microsoft licenses are distributed across your organization. A license overview is instrumental for evaluating how much you’re spending on your Office 365 investment, providing you with a lot of leverage for cutting costs.

So, for example, using this report you can see what licenses are available for assignment or aren’t being used, and you can check what date a user received a certain license.

In our recent Office 365 license management study, we found organizations with 10,000 users or more could save around $150,000 with a better licensing strategy, which is why it’s critical in today’s economic environment to be active in reducing your spending.

To see how this looks in Nova, here’s an example of a customizable report:

If you’d like to learn more about licensing, we’ve previously written expert guidance on how to take a strategic approach; How to Close the Office 365 License Gap goes into detail about the influencing factors impacting your license spend and key next steps.

Alternatively, you can check out Microsoft MVP Paul Robichaux’s guide on How to Avoid License Rustling for his metaphorical strategy for nailing Office 365 license assignment.

2) Mail Traffic

This report shows the size and number of emails that are flowing in and out of your Office 365 environment over a certain period. It also demonstrates the types of emails they are (inbound, outbound, spam, malware, etc.).

As people are reliant on email for many business functions and productivity, this can grind to a halt when it’s not working. The mail traffic report can be used as a barometer for your tenant health, it can also be used to spot a problem with an individual account such as only able to receive/send. Furthermore, you could use it to just show your admin accounts as a matter of best practice to ensure that your admins are not using their account for emailing and should be using their user accounts instead.

For example, you can use the report to see if you received more inbound spam messages on a certain day. Or, to see which departments sent the most messages this month.

Below is an example of how a bespoke mail traffic report looks in Nova:

3) Teams Usage

This Teams Usage report in Nova shows aggregate Teams usage data based on statistics gathered daily. This powerful report gives you a true sense of the scale and importance of Teams within your organization, and also identifies areas when you need to implement an adoption strategy.

For example, you can review the total number of Team chats or calls to get a complete picture of usage. Or, you can view usage by department and see if some groups under-utilize the tool. What this does is enables you to refine by the department who is using Teams and who isn’t.

Here’s what a Teams Usage report could look like in your environment:

4) User Details

This report shows a list of Microsoft 365 users, along with their department, location, job title, and more. It also shows a graph of users by country and a list of most recent password changes.

For example, if a user contacts the help desk saying they changed their password last week and can’t remember their new password. Now they’re locked out of their account. If desired, the member of the help desk could use this report to see the organization’s most recent password changes and verify the user changed their password last week.

As an aside: If they have permission, the member of the help desk could then reset the user’s password right from Nova, using the Nova Delegation and Policy Control service.

Here’s how a User Details report looks in Nova:

5) Inactive and Underused Objects

This report shows inactive Office 365 resources, including under-used mailboxes, inactive SharePoint sites, empty teams, and more.

Below is an example of how the Inactive and Underused Objects report looks:

For example, you could use this report to clean up empty OneDrive containers, inactive SharePoint sites, and users with no activity in the past 3 months. This also gives you the data needed to make informed business decisions about your IT investment.

To learn more about the full potential of Nova and how detailed Office 365 reports integrate with the platform, please contact our specialist team to arrange a demo.