Pro Tips: Tracking Your Microsoft Office 365 Adoption and Usage

Microsoft’s latest financial results paint an interesting picture. Its commercial cloud services exceeded $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time. Much of the growth came from Office 365 commercial revenue, which grew 19% in the last year.

With more employees than ever working from home, Office 365 usage has continued to grow. It’s the ideal platform for the modern workplace, primed to improve productivity and collaboration… but only if users truly embrace it. 

Unfortunately, one area where Microsoft 365 lacks is in tracking and reporting adoption levels, and providing the necessary visibility to manage licenses and encourage use.

Why is this important? Here are some of the benefits of tracking adoption.

Tracking Office 365 Adoption and Usage

Tracking Office 365 user adoption can tell you a lot about how your organization operates and whether your employees are working efficiently. Here are five key benefits that can improve productivity and potentially reduce your subscription costs.

1. Reduced Upkeep

Tracking adoption and usage can help you determine which applications are being used and how. When everyone is using Office 365, you may be able to eliminate other software within your organization. This reduces your upkeep, maintenance, upgrades, and patches.

2. Track Active Licenses

Tracking active licenses is essential for managing Microsoft Office 365 efficiently. Most organizations have more licenses than they need. This overbuying can waste precious capital that could be better spent elsewhere. Tracking Office 365 adoption and usage can help uncover if you have unused licenses that can be discontinued at renewal time to reduce costs.

Each employee with a license can install Office 365 on up to five devices (including personal devices). IT teams need to have complete visibility into what’s installed and where to track licenses effectively.

3. Right-sizing Your Storage

When subscribing to Office 365, you’re assigned an allocation for storage depending on your plan and the number of users. If you need more, you’ll pay for it. Tracking helps you maintain the right amount of storage you need without paying for capacity you won’t be using.

4. Improve Communication and Collaboration

When employees are using the full suite of Office 365 communication and collaboration tools, it reduces information siloes and shadow IT reliance. Tracking adoption and usage can help you determine whether employees are embracing Office 365 and where they may benefit from additional training.

5. Predictable Spending

One significant advantage of tracking adoption and usage is that it will be easier to anticipate your next Office 365 invoice. Effective Office 365 license management can create opportunities for savings that can lower your spending.

Enhanced Visibility

To effectively track your Office 365 adoption, you’ll also want to compare it to how employees use other applications. If you can find continued usage for applications that duplicate features in Office 365, you can help employees move to the services you’re already paying for.

They may need additional training to understand how Office 365 can do the job they need. For example, if you find employees are using Zoom when they have Microsoft Teams available or sending email attachments back and forth rather than using SharePoint or OneDrive for collaboration, you can help them make the move.

Changing Behaviors

It’s not always easy to get people to change their ways, especially if they’ve been doing things a certain way for a long time. Just because you’ve given them a platform that does fantastic things, it doesn’t mean they’ll instantly adopt it. Hands-on training can help them understand the benefits to change behavior. Tracking can monitor their use and help encourage them to adopt Office 365.

Embrace the Modern Workplace

Office 365 is built for today’s increased mobility needs. With more employees working remotely, the modern workplace needs enhanced tools for communication and collaboration as workforces become more distributed. By tracking usage, IT teams can help employees get the full benefits of the modern workplace.

Quadrotech’s Nova Management Platform for Office 365

Office 365 is a robust platform, but its reporting and management capabilities leave a lot to be desired. It can be challenging to manage licenses, estimate subscription costs, and encourage adoption without using additional tools.

Enterprise organizations can master the Microsoft cloud using Quadrotech’s Office 365 management software, which provides deeper operational visibility and control of your Office 365 environment. 

Advanced Office 365 reporting functions are fully customizable, allowing you to track usage, while Adoption Accelerator provides granular data to locate and segment users who are lagging. 

It allows IT teams to build sophisticated, multi-phase email campaigns with tips and training to encourage adoption, setting clear goals that can be easily monitored. You can learn more in the short video below:

Nova also provides delegation and policy control (DPC), including policy-based automation for authorization, configuration, and license assignment. 

To learn more about the full power of Nova, please contact our team to arrange a demo today.