Last year at Microsoft Ignite, it was announced that there would be a brand new SharePoint Online Admin Center which would provide more information about the health of your SharePoint environment and how it is being used. The new SharePoint Online Admin Center is available now in some tenants as a preview, and it lives up to great expectations!
When you visit your SharePoint Online Admin Center, you may already see the option to try the preview in the top right hand corner of your page. When you land on the new SharePoint Admin Center page, you’ll immediately be presented with four main components comprising of two charts displaying Files by activity type, and Total and active sites along with a Message Center and Service Health information. (See below screenshot)
Figure 1: The new SharePoint Online Admin Center home.
You can drill into each of the charts by clicking the details link to show some very useful information based on 7, 30, 90 or 180 day time periods. The reports show a chart and grid for many different reports based on usage and activity. The usage and activity reports span multiple Office 365 products such as Yammer, Email, OneDrive, Teams, Skype for Business and SharePoint. So you can certainly understand how your tenant is being used across the suite of services.
Figure 2: Drilling into the new SharePoint Admin Center details.
Clicking Usage on the breadcrumb trail provides a great overview of each of the services on the same page.
Figure 3: Overview of the Usage of all services
Perhaps one of the most useful features of the new SharePoint Online Admin Center is the Site Management page. The Site Management provides a modern list view of each SharePoint Online site, and by default shows the columns; site name, storage used, primary admin, template, last activity, created on, and the URL. Of course you can sort by each of the columns, or also use the views defined which include All Sites, Largest Sites, Least Active Sites, and Most Popular Shared Sites. Adding new columns provides the ability to also add whether the site is groupified, externally shared, as well as displaying the number of files viewed or edited, page views, and files. New sites can be created, as well as having the option to export the report to a csv.
SharePoint Site Admins can also be emailed using the Email Admins button. I can think of some great scenarios such as checking whether the site is still required based on the low activity report on the site.
Figure 4: The Site Management list
Double clicking each site in the list displays a property pane. The properties shows some useful information, but also gives you the ability to modify the Primary Admin, Change Admins, and also Change the Sharing status allowing for tenant admins to easily see and modify the sites have been shared externally.
Figure 5: The Site Management Property Pane
The External Sharing option allows you to set whether sharing is allowed for each site.
Figure 6: External Sharing Settings
You perhaps also noticed that tenant admins have the ability to Delete sites from the Site management list. This is a great feature for deleting those sites that are no longer used, and also include the ability to recover the deletion.
Figure 7: Deleted Sites
There are many more features on the way by the looks of things which you can learn about in the SharePoint admin center (preview) release notes.
More information can also be found in the Microsoft Tech Community blog.
