One of my customers who has fully embraced the new Teams application provided with O365 subscriptions wanted to be able to run reports to see how users were using the Teams application, what Teams were active and what users were active in any given Team.

There were two reports that seemed applicable:

  • O365 Group Report
    • This report provides information on when a Group was last active, who the owner is of that Group, files, storage and other pieces of information. There is no user information, so it could just be one user doing everything, you would never know.
  • Teams User Activity Report
    • This report, breaks things down by user and there is no mention of what groups that user is a member of. So you can see what user A was doing, e.g. uploading a file, having a chat and when they were last active, but no which groups they were active in.

Both of these reports have a field “Last Activity Date”, the customer was interested in how reliable this date was (or wasn’t).

From testing done with the customer and on my own tenant for verification purposes (obviously on a smaller scale), we observed the following:

  • It takes at least 24-48 hours for the activity to show in any of the reports.
  • In the O365 Group Report, the field “Last Activity Date” means that at least one user who is a member of the specified Team listed in the report, has accessed that Teams on the date mentioned.
  • For the Team User Activity Report the “Last Activity Date” field means that the specified user accessed at least one of the Teams for which they are a member of, on the date mentioned.
  • Logging into the Teams application (web version of desktop client) is classed as Teams activity for any given user. Given that the desktop application automatically starts and signs in at user log on, this could lead to false positives in the reports.

Essentially, the reports do not provide meaningful data when you want to correlate user activity with Team activity.

This issue was raised with Microsoft for clarification on the reporting behaviour and what exactly the “Last Activity Date” field reflected, and our observations were confirmed.

I did also ask if any new reports were likely to be created for Teams and User activity and was informed that there is a new report being developed, which will hopefully be available by the end of 2018.