UPDATE March 8th: to know more about Office 365 Reporting Web Service (and maybe build a solution) go there http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj984325.aspx
Following my previous post presenting the new Office 365 administration portal UI, I will explain with this post how to use Excel for viewing (and analyzing) Office 365 reports.
The Office 365 reports are covering lot of customer needs for reporting, from active & inactive mailboxes to mail protection (spam, mail sent/received…).
Use the administration portal to view reports
The reports are accessible through the administration portal (section Reports on the left)
From there, you just have to click on the report you want to see
Reports are really clear and understandable but this way (using the administration portal), you can not print them, export them or do analytic work… and you can only see ONE report at a time, to see another report you have to get back to the reports section by hitting the narrow
Use the Excel add-in
To be able to do analytic work with these reports, you can use Excel 2013. You can not do this with previous version of Excel
Reports available through this add-in are only covering Exchange Online Protection (spam, viruses, DLP…)
Install the add-in
You have to install a small add-in available from the reports section (the link is shown on the top right – direct link http://g.microsoftonline.com/0BX20en/741)
The add-in to be used must match the Office 2013 version you have installed; this mean if you have installed Office 2013 32 bits, you must install the 32 bits version of the add-in
The installation wizard is very simple
You have the choice to use your cloud-based (including in hybrid mode) or your on-premises mail system (which use Exchange Online Protection)
Then the wizard is checking if prerequisites are matched (Excel 2013 and .Net Framework 4.5)
NOTE if you are not running the correct version of the add-in, Excel 2013 will not be detected as shown below – Office 2013 used is 32 bits edition while the add-in is 64 bits
Launch the add-in
Once the add-in setup process is finished, there is no shortcut on the Start menu neither through Excel. The shortcut is shown on your desktop
To start the add-in double click on this shortcut this will start Excel and load the add-in
To gather data, just hit the Query button
This will ask you to connect to your Office 365 tenant (or Exchange Online Protection)
Then you have to set a time interval
Then Excel is connecting to Office 365 reports service
You can now work with Exchange Protection reports