Microsoft 365 admin digest - January 2023

New year, new blog series - one aimed at celebrating and empowering IT administrators, the superheroes of organizations everywhere. The role of admins has expanded beyond just ensuring efficient management of existing technology to broadly driving the success of digital workplace tools.

With each post in this series, we will explore different aspects of IT administration as a role and as an industry. We’ll also highlight investments we’re making at Microsoft to address emerging needs of IT admins. Have a story to share or topic you’d like us to cover? Comment below and we may pick it up!

In case you missed it

2022 saw a broad return to in-person activities while accommodating the flexibility of remote day-to-day work. The team at WorkLab continue to dive deep into this topic, and has been publishing their latest findings through the Work Trend Index Report. Back in September at Ignite, we highlighted various features launched in the Microsoft 365 admin center, specifically aimed at benefiting admins.

• For enterprise IT admins to stay on top of driving adoption and usage of digital tools, we launched Experience insights as a way to get summarized views of core user experience metrics so you can drive successful adoption, identify user pain points, and ensure users are getting the most out of Microsoft 365 features. Additionally, we reintroduced Adoption Score as a set of anonymized metrics for IT admins and adoption specialists to better understand your organization’s Microsoft 365 usage patterns.
• Equally as important, we launched the Microsoft 365 Health dashboard for Public Preview. Available to all, optimized for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), the dashboard is designed to provide IT admins with key information from various admin centers, including service health alerts, issues that require your action, software update status, and recommended actions for improving your organization’s health.
• To keep you productive on the go, we've also continued to invest in the Microsoft 365 Admin mobile app. No matter where you’re working, you can use the app (available for iOS and Android devices) to access user administration, group management, license management, and support. You’ll also see notifications for service health, changes, and billing updates, and you can browse the Message center to learn about new features and other upcoming changes. Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Admin mobile app here.
• For SMB customers, we’ve also added a new embedded Microsoft 365 Admin app in Microsoft Teams (available in the Microsoft Teams app store), which provides a simplified view that gives admins the capabilities they might often need in one place, such as onboarding new users, managing Teams settings and privacy, and opening support cases. Admins can also access the Admin app through the Teams mobile app. Learn more in this article.

These are just a few highlights from Ignite 2022. To view the full article from Ignite on what’s relevant for IT admins, click here.

An image demonstrating a setup task that completed in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Looking ahead

As we begin 2023, we plan to continue building functionality aimed at delivering a better experience for IT admins and support new ways to bring value to your business. Our areas of investment will continue to focus on delivering rich and useful experiences for IT admins across their range of responsibilities within the Microsoft 365 admin center and keeping up with the evolving needs of the role.

Broadly speaking, we plan to:

• Expand the availability of the Experience insights dashboard to more customers, particularly medium-sized businesses. We also plan to continue making improvements to the dashboard functionality based on feedback we receive to ensure it is effectively meeting the needs of viewers.
• Launch a slew of updates to support admins with being more active in the strategic digital transformation of their organizations. These range from interface and user experience improvements, to enhanced support and value guidance content that can empower IT pros in conversations to steer digital strategy.

Over the coming months, we’ll continue sharing highlights and insights that we think benefit IT admins through this blog series. Consider subscribing to updates on specific items in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and look out for communications published to the Message Center in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Comment below if there are topics within IT administration you want us to explore!

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