MyAnalytics

Microsoft Viva replaced MyAnalytics emails

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Today I noticed for the first time, that the MyAnalytics emails that were coming through weekly, showing where your time was being spent, emails you may need to respond to etc had been replaced by Microsoft Viva. There’s also a post in TechCommunity covering this in detail.

The previous MyAnalytics emails would come in weekly, and be broken up into different editions – Wellbeing, Focus, Collaboration or Network edition. This new monthly digest indicates Microsoft Viva is the way forward. Note that this still works the same way as MyAnalytics where the contents of the email are private to you, and do not come as a normal email that would be trackable (more details in my MyAnalytics article)

The new emails still (for now) link back to the https://myanalytics.microsoft.com/ domain which again for now, shows the message that it’s becoming Microsoft Viva:

That ‘Learn more’ link takes you here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-viva/insights/?s=mya with some details around Microsoft Viva. One of the main links there takes you to Viva Insights on Teams, which is the Insights addin option that’ll show up on the left menu and take you to the Viva Insights Home page.

The Stay Connected tab is worth checking out, as it will highlight email conversations it thinks are things you need to do, or highlight people (team members for me) that you don’t have a 1 on 1 meeting scheduled for the next twk weeks.

Going back to the web page for Microsoft Viva, there’s a lot more content then when I looked when it first launched. One section I thought was notable was under Network, you can see your Top Collaborators and their read percent and response time of emails.

My point on all this, is that there’s a lot going on here. People may find it and have questions around it, especially when these emails are generated to all staff by default. Someone may have stumbled across the ‘Delay Delivery enabled’ option and turned it on, then forgotten about it later, complaining about emails being slow to get to customers or clients:

What we’re seeing above with Microsoft Viva and MyAnalytics (now Viva Insights) is only a part of the full Microsoft Viva solution too – there’s also Viva Connections, Viva Topics and Viva Learning:

Viva Connections and Viva Insights are generally covered under an existing license, but Viva Topics and Viva Learning are at an extra cost.

Microsoft Briefing Emails Are Coming

Posted on by Adam Fowler

More Microsoft driven emails will be hitting your user’s mailboxes if you’re a Microsoft 365 Customer.

The last ones I wrote about were MyAnalytics, and now we have Microsoft Briefings. The first I heard about this was an admin email I received, which I think is a good idea that Microsoft are following, probably from feedback when they rolled out MyAnalytics and many IT Admins were caught unaware:

So, as you can read above, Microsoft Briefings reads what the users are up to, and presents it to them in hopefully a useful fashion to catch emails they might have missed that sound like they need actioning, will give some ideas on how someone can be more efficient and healthy etc

I received my first email today, and here’s how it looked:

I blurred out the email that I’d already actioned, and marked it as completed. Just like MyAnalytics, these emails are only visible by someone who has access to your mailbox – the emails that turn up don’t traverse the internet like other emails; instead, Microsoft are popping them up straight into the mailbox. You won’t find any mailflow trackings of these.

A user can opt out if they don’t like them, or an admin can follow the documentation to pre-emptively disable this on a user by user basis. There appears to be no org-wide setting to disable, so if you need to disable it, make sure you include it as a provisioning step for new users too. See the update at the bottom of the page.

There’s also a portal users can use to unsubscribe: https://cortana.office.com/

Once the magic Microsoft switch is set to ‘on’ for your tenant, users will get an email every day that they have some sort of content to be in the briefings email – if there’s no content, there’s no email.

Just like MyAnalytics, I recommend communicating this soon to your company that the emails are coming. Some people might not like it, but preparing staff for a something that can help them should help with adoption, rather than an out of the blue starter email.

I’m keen to see how effective the Briefings emails will be and how much value they provide. I think it’s a good idea, and as long as it works as the box describes, should add value for staff at the start of each day to remind them what they’ve got going on, and potentially pick up something they forgot to action.

Update 17th June 2020

Microsoft have listened and acted quickly – you can now toggle this feature on or off at the tenant level. To do so, go to the Microsoft 365 admin center, and under Services > Org settings, the Services tab contains the item ‘Briefing emails (Preview)’. From here, there’s your tickbox to turn it off or on.

MyAnalytics is Coming (for the rest of us)

Posted on by Adam Fowler

MyAnalytics is an extension to Microsoft 365 which provides productivity insights. It looks at what you do over email, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online/Teams, and collates the data to present it with statistics.

The documentation for how this product works is quite good and worth a read. There’s privacy considerations in any product that’s scraping data, but they seem fairly well addressed. Two main points are that the data for MyAnalytics is processed and stored in the user’s Exchange Online mailbox, and nobody but the user can see this data (including system administrators).

MyAnalytics has been around for a while, but mostly for Office 365 E5 / Microsoft 365 E5 customers so many people have not heard of it, or have no experience in it. Microsoft are changing who gets access to this data, and are currently rolling out Digest emails to E3, E1 and Business customers.

If you have the feature already turned on, then your users can probably already access their dashboard at https://myanalytics.microsoft.com/ and start checking it out.

MyAnalytics is controlled by a license under the Microsoft 365 product. Many people probably have all the components on, and therefore although users have had access to this product, it hasn’t really been visible. The Welcome email comes first, and it seems to be rolling out right now to Targeted Release users in Microsoft 365.

Beyond just turning MyAnalytics on, there’s a few admin controls available at the tenant level and user level. You’ll need to consider items like ‘should users be opted-in by default, or opted-out’ if there are concerns around data scraping – even though this all lives in your Microsoft tenant, there could still be staff that are not comfortable with this.

Nascar use MyAnalytics if that helps you point to another company using it:

As you can see, I’ve linked to a bunch of Microsoft documentation around this rather than rewriting what they have – always nice to see quality doco!

It’s worth checking out MyAnalytics now and deciding if it’s something you want – at least check the state of your settings before users start getting Welcome emails!

Update 20th September

The product group have advised me on one extra tip – disabling the ‘Weekly insights email‘ option at the admin end will actually disable the Welcome email too – documentation to be updated shortly.