Announcing the new Office 365 admin center

Today, we’re excited to announce the rollout of the new Office 365 admin center. The new admin center makes it faster, easier and more efficient to manage Office 365.

Over the last few years, Office 365 has been evolving at a rapid pace, making more features and functionality available to users and admins on an almost daily basis. As the service evolves, we wanted to make it easier for you to find common tasks and scenarios.

Improved experience for all customers

We built the new admin center hand-in-hand with our customers. From the very beginning, through the introduction of the first preview back in September, we’ve incorporated your feedback into the development of the new experience. We’ve received hundreds of pieces of feedback each day, with amazing insights, and we read all of them. You influenced every change we made.

The new admin center includes significant enhancements:

Simplification and discoverability—When you access the admin center, you don’t want to spend more time in there than necessary. You want to get your work done quickly and be able to focus on all the other tasks on your long list. The new admin center allows you to manage Office 365 quickly and efficiently by showing frequent tasks directly on the dashboard and by simplifying the experience. For many tasks, you won’t even have to leave the dashboard. It’s all there at your fingertips.

Search—We added a new search bar at the top of the admin center to help you quickly find the feature you want to use. Today, you can search for users and groups to look up details and make edits. In the near future, search will extend to other features as well.

Reporting—We are currently rolling out significant improvements to Office 365 reporting. Many of you already have access to a variety of new reports that provide consistent insights across all workloads and deliver details down to the individual user level. You can see how users are adopting Office 365 at the subscription level as well as for each specific workload. Reports currently available include active Office 365 users, email traffic and Office activations. In the coming months, we’ll add reports for OneDrive, SharePoint, Yammer and Skype for Business activity as well as on user interaction with Office 365, such as which operating systems users are on when they access the service.

Just the beginning, more enhancements are in the works

Our goal is to make the admin center experience simple, fast and efficient to enable you to achieve more easily what you need to get done while increasing features and functionality. We’ll be adding further enhancements in the near future, including:

Customization—Soon, you’ll be able to customize the dashboard as well as other areas of the admin center to tailor it to your needs. Your feedback made it very clear that admins have very different roles and priorities and you need the ability to tailor the admin center to meet the needs of your role. For example, in a larger enterprise, your role as an admin may be focused on a specific service and billing might not be one of your areas of responsibility. To allow you to personalize the admin center, we’re introducing customization.

Contextual help—We know that not all customers are experts in all capabilities within the admin center. We are working to include contextual help and detailed explanations of functionality right next to the task to improve your ability to quickly make settings, user or configuration changes and to use the admin center more efficiently. For example, when creating a new user account, you see details on the settings for creating account names, including limitations in length, special characters and numerals. That way you don’t have to jump out to separate help articles to understand and accomplish the task. New short, embedded “Discover and Learn” videos will provide additional information.

Rolling out worldwide

Over the next few weeks, the new admin center and the reporting dashboard will gradually start to roll out as the default experience. While you’re getting used to the new admin center, you will be able to switch back to the old experience. All features will gradually be added over the coming weeks so that the new admin center will soon be your go-to place for all management, configuration and reporting needs.

There are a few ways you can check out the new admin center preview:

• You can use the “Get a sneak peek” link at the top of the old admin center.
• Or you can watch the following video:

In the new admin center, you can use the feedback tool to tell us what you like or what we can do better. Please keep the feedback coming!

—Anne Michels @Anne_Michels, senior product marketing manager for the Office 365 Marketing team