Interpreting Office365 Last Activity

Last updated: October 8, 2024

After this article...

You'll understand how Lumos retrieves and shows you last activity data for Microsoft products and licenses, as well as the known limitations of this data.

What Office365 products and licenses show last activity in Lumos?

Lumos gets activity data for Microsoft products from the Microsoft Graph API.

The Microsoft Graph API only exposes activity data for the apps below:

  • Outlook

  • Word

  • Excel

  • PowerPoint

  • OneNote

  • Exchange

  • OneDrive

  • SharePoint

  • Yammer

  • Teams

Since Microsoft only returns this data, we can show license activity for the following license types:

  • Microsoft 365 E3

  • Office 365 E3

  • Microsoft 365 Apps for Business

  • Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise

  • Office 365 E1

  • Microsoft 365 F3

  • Microsoft 365 Business Standard

  • Microsoft 365 E5

  • Microsoft Teams Exploratory

  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic

How Lumos reports Office365 activity data

Lumos gets activity data from Microsoft for Microsoft apps.

The activity for Microsoft apps is shown in the Product column under the Product tab.

In Microsoft, apps are tied to a license. For example, the Microsoft 365 Business Standard license is linked to Word and Excel.

Lumos reports last activity for a license based on the most recent activity for an app linked to that license. For example, if someone last accessed Word 10 days ago and Excel 15 days ago, the last activity for the Microsoft 365 Business Standard license would be reported in Lumos as 10 days ago.

You can see this for a user by clicking on the License column and looking at the License tab.

Lumos then reports last activity for the user's Office365 account as a whole by using the most recent license activity.

This means that if a user has two Office365 licenses, the value in the Last Activity column will be the most recent last activity value for the two licenses they have.

How current is the Office365 data?

Lumos attempts to refresh this data daily, but there is known latency in how Microsoft reports this data and it may be up to a week out of date at any given time (more information here).

If you're creating Inactivity Workflows for Office365, you may want to add 7 days to your inactivity window to account for known latency in Microsoft's reporting. See 📄 Creating An Inactivity Workflow

FAQs

What Office365 activity value(s) do Lumos Inactive Account Workflows use?

Today, we use the Last Activity for the employee's Microsoft account as a whole, not for the individual licenses and products.

How do I refresh Office365 activity data?

Lumos automatically refreshes this data nightly, but you can refresh it anytime by going to your Office365 integration (from the Integrations tab) and clicking "Sync Office365 Users".

Why is my activity data failing to sync?

While there could be several causes, starting September 1, 2021 Microsoft started hiding user information by default for all reports (more information here).  Lumos will to fail to pull activity data for users if they're given anonymous user names in Microsoft's reporting.

1. Log in to the Microsoft 365 admin center with an account that has the necessary administrative permissions.
2. Navigate to Settings -> Org Settings -> Services -> Reports.
3. Ensure the setting "Display concealed user, group, and site names in all reports" is enabled.