News

Microsoft Adoption Score Product Replaces Productivity Score for Tracking Microsoft 365 Apps Use

• By Kurt Mackie
• 08/26/2022

Microsoft on Thursday announced the rollout of Adoption Score, a service that tracks Microsoft 365 use in organizations that was formerly called "Productivity Score."

Adoption Score shows how Microsoft 365 software gets used in an organizations. It offers "recommended actions" for more efficient use of those products. It also has a scoring service across eight categories that can be compared with similar sized organizations. It pulls the Microsoft 365 application use data from "Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Yammer and Skype," per this "Adoption Score" document.

Adoption Score Now Available
The announcement suggested that Adoption Score is bringing new features, and it's arriving as early as today for certain Microsoft 365 subscribers.

"Adoption Score will start rolling out today to replace the former Productivity Score dashboards and introduce new features, new controls, new guidelines, and new purpose," the announcement indicated.

A new feature addition called "Time Trends" was described. It shows Microsoft 365 use across an organization "from 28 days up to 180 days" as part of the "people experience category." The people experience category is said to measure "how the organization works using Microsoft 365 categories like content collaboration, mobility, communication, meetings, and teamwork," per the "Adoption Score" document.

Adoption Score also has a "technology experience category" that's described as showing "the efficient use of Microsoft 365." It's based on using Adoption Score's Endpoint Analytics service, which shows hardware and software "performance and health issues." Endpoint Analytics gets turned on within Microsoft Intune, which is Microsoft's mobile management service.

The licensing for Adoption Score requires having certain Microsoft 365 subscriptions, but organizations also will need an Intune license to get the technology experience information.

Here's how the "Adoption Score" document described those licensing aspects:

For people experiences data, you need a Microsoft 365 for business or Office 365 for enterprise subscription. For endpoint analytics data for your tenant, you need to add Microsoft Intune to your subscription.

Adoption Score and Privacy
Microsoft offers Adoption Score through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center portal. Its information is only accessible to individuals with certain Microsoft roles, as listed in the "Adoption Score" document. However, access can include possible non-IT roles, such as the "Global Reader" role and the "Reports Reader" role.

Microsoft claims that Adoption Score just shows "anonymized metrics." The announcement stated that "Adoption Score is backed by Microsoft's continued commitment to user-level privacy -- meaning no one in a customer's organization can use Adoption Score to access data about how an individual user is using apps and services in Microsoft 365."

Microsoft emphasis on the information being anonymized stems from a time when it wasn't private at all. In late 2020, Microsoft made it known that it had removed the ability of Productivity Score to identity users when using Microsoft 365 apps. Productivity Score had been seen back then as offering a way for organizations to snoop on individual user behaviors.