Last week Microsoft released Teams activity reports in Power BI that allows you to analyze how much time you have been spending on meetings, how much you have been talking over various chats, how much time you shared your screens etc. and all this is available instantly. For me, this is how it looked like –
So, let us quickly look at how it works, some internals of it and the things that you need to be aware of as follows –
Simply go to Microsoft Teams and search for Power BI by clicking on the ellipsis (in my case just below the communities icon) –
and then click on Add button to install this –
Once Power BI has been installed into your Teams interface, navigate to the app and click on Create followed by Analyze your Teams data as shown below –
As soon as you click on Analyze your Teams data, it starts collecting the data, creates a report and publish it which may take from few seconds to couple of minutes.
Yay! We are ready to instantly see how much time we have been spending on calls, chats, meetings etc. which can be analyzed up to 90 days in the history –
Not just your activities, it gives you further details about all the teams/channels you are part of. Teams names below have been made hidden but you will see all your teams names –
Sounds interesting? Let us see some internals of it –
As this report is being created, it has been automatically published to your “My Workspace“. If you go to PBI service, you will find its content there as –
Not just this, it has been automatically scheduled to be refreshed daily. You can see this in its dataset settings as –
Further, you can download the .pbix from workspace and customize the report as per your own preference.
All other aspects which are applicable to datasets gets applicable to this as well like if report is not being used for about two months, its scheduled refresh gets disabled/paused automatically by sending a notification to the owner of report.
Additional few things that you need to be aware of –
- This is currently under Preview which means Microsoft is collecting feedback on how this could be improvised further
- As of now it is available in English only
- Since by default this gets published into individual’s private workspace, even administrators may not have any control on this from governance perspective
You can encourage your teams to do this self-service analysis of their time utilization and do the needful if their productivity has been a concern for them.
I am sure, you also will have your own thoughts and perspectives on this feature so please feel motivated to share your opinions or experience in the comments section below.
Many Thanks for reading!