Last week the Office 365 team announced some new capabilities that will give customers more visibility into content and activities in their tenants, “including the Office 365 activity report, comprehensive logging capability, PowerShell command or cmdlet and a preview of the Office 365 Management Activity API.”

Here’s what we have to look forward to with these new capabilities.

Office 365 Activity Report

Admins can investigate user activity using this new report, and download the activities to a CSV file. Not only can admins search users, they can also look at files or other resources in SharePoint online, OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online, and Azure Active Directory. Organizations that have stringent compliance and reporting can use this report to meet those requirements. We can expect to see the link to this report in the Reports section of the Admin Compliance Center once it’s available.

The TechNet page Run the Office 365 activity report has more information.

Search Activity Logs with PowerShell cmdlet

Activity logs (like the ones that appear in the report described above) will be able to be searched with PowerShell, using the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet. You’re able to run scoped queries against the audit storage log and export the logs to a file.

For more info, see the Search-UnifiedAuditLog article.

Office 365 Management Activity API

A new API is now in preview with Office 365: the Management Activity API. According to Microsoft, this will “allows organizations and other software providers to integrate Office 365 activity data into their security and compliance monitoring and reporting solutions.” The Dev Center hosts the preview registration, and it should be slowly opened to more and more participants.