Top 10 Best Free Office 365 Reporting Tools (Pros and Cons). Office 365 is a management software that allows businesses to gain visibility and insight into the Microsoft Office collection, like Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, as well as email storage and other file solutions. Therefore, it is generally used for improving productivity, connectivity, and even your organization as a whole.
With the help of Office 365 tools, we can monitor and audit Office365 user’s and mailboxes used by IT professionals. It provides features involving monitoring of network, workload and latency tests. Additionally, it also provides assistance to granular administrative tasks like setting up employee devices, granting a user permission, and setting alerts for crucial tasks.
Moreover, the reporting features of Office 365 are granular and provisioned with information essential for operational effectiveness. In this blog, we are going to discuss Top 10 Best Free Office 365 Reporting Tools (Pros and Cons). So, let’s get started.
The top choice on our list goes to Infra SOS by Cloud Infrastructure Services. This Office365 tool provides an Active Directory Reporting and Office 365 reporting solution that gives you detailed reports on Active Directory, Office 365 and Azure AD monitoring on all Active Directory Objects and Attributes. This way, you can secure and ensure that your AD is compliant. With InfraSOS you can create your own custom reports concerning any type of user on any type of user setting, passwords, groups, attribute entries, OUs, computer objects and many more. Infra SOS can even assist you in running and emailing automatically schedule reports on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Second on our comparison list of Top 10 Best Free Office 365 Reporting Tools (Pros and Cons) is Admindoid . It is another top choice for Office 365 reporting tool. It makes your reporting decision fast and gives better experience. It comprises advanced built reports that manage your users, licenses, mailbox, group, document, site, etc. it even controls access permission and security setting on multiple essential Office 365 components. You can identify top trending mailboxes, sites, documents and AD groups in your organization. With the Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint sites, you can visualize both the internal and outgoing traffic. Therefore, you can be up to date with near real time reports that auto refreshed after every interval.
Another viable choice for cloud deployment is Manage Engine’s Office 365. If you are overwhelmed with the responsibility of ensuring the security of critical resources, M365 Manager Plus looks deep into the data and presents your reports at a granular level. It results for you in providing valuable insight concerning the setup for Microsoft 365. The Microsoft 365 reports gives you detailed view to help you to make decisions.
Pros of ManageEngine
You can maintain a sturdy condition for your exchange online environment.
It helps you to gain visibility and knowledge on Azure AD users, distribution lists, security groups, and licenses.
It also provides exhaustive preconfigured reports to manage your Skype for effective business setup.
It offers OneDrive for Business, which holds the critical resources, thereby enabling you to keep track of the files and folders accessed within it.
Cons of ManageEngine
It has limited reporting features that make it difficult to obtain the information you want to display in detail.
It comprises a required field within the ticket template that restricts the submission of tickets without first completing it.
With the Office 365 Reporting tool you tend to obtain 1500 plus pre built reports. It manages users and their licenses efficiently to reduce license costs. It is relatively very effective for Small Organizations as it provides a center to assign and monitor licenses. On the contrary, larger organizations can use PowerShell cmdlets to manage licenses.
Pros of Office 365
It has administrators that are well versed in managing users and their licenses efficiently to reduce costs.
It is effective for small organizations as it assigns and monitors licenses.
It also encompasses an All in One PowerShell script for M365 license management.
Cons of Office 365
Larger organizations have to use PowerShell cmdlets to manage licenses.
If you are a beginner, you might find it challenging to assign and remove challenges in bulk and generate license reports.
Netwrix provides actionable intelligence about the things that are going on in your Office 365 environment. You can effortlessly acquire reports on who is accessing and what the user is accessing. It means that it monitors the activity of the user in SharePoint Online and even audits all modifications and non owner mailbox access events that will not only enhance the security but also streamline IT compliance.
Pros of Netwrix
It monitors each change made in the SharePoint Online sites, lists, and documents and OneDrive for business data. This way, it detects suspicious activity and prevents loss.
It detects non owner access to mailboxes and immediately notifies the owners about all the mailbox activities.
It makes you capable of delivering predefined reports and dashboards with filtering and sorting.
It eliminates the time spent on preparing compliance audits with predetermined reports.
Cons of Netwrix
It does not provide customized reporting features.
The user interface is relatively difficult to access.
There needs to be more depth to One Drive Reporting.
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Interesting choice on our list of Top 10 Best Free Office 365 Reporting Tools (Pros and Cons) is Quadrotech Nova by Quest Office 365. It is a reporting tool used for delivering valuable insights required to monitor security settings, permissions, mail flow, storage optimization, user adoption, license management, etc. It provides multiple customizable reports spanning several data sources. This way, you can acquire granular details and take decisive decisions, thereby eliminating the need for complicated PowerShell scripts.
Pros of Quadrotech
Its active directory attributes are concerned with departments, locations, users, custom properties, and more.
It enables you to combine multiple data sources with an extensive charting library, so allowing you to create heat maps, double pie charts, a world map and much more.
It provides a complete view of the individual user and team statistics.
The reports provided by Quadrotech comprise data acquired directly from the audit log like count of failed logins.
This enables you to issue, schedule and share insights across your organization in a secure and controlled manner.
Cons of Quadrotech
It does not provide live support 24/7.
It does not provide any training like documentation, webinars, live online, or in person.
Vyapin Office 365 provides you with the most advanced reporting and analytics solution for administration, governance and planning. It provides more than 200 reports that can be used immediately without any PowerShell scripts. The reports are automated and actionable and offer unsurpassed customization and usability for its report data for collaborating and sharing, thereby ensuring smooth and optimal functioning of Office 365.
Pros of Vyapin
You can discover and document the reports in Office 365.
Gives you visibility into what is happening in your Office 365.
It audits all the activities for managing security, compliance and change.
It enables you to manage user access rights to fix internal security threats and DLP.
It provides usage and analytics to help them in growth and capacity planning.
Cons of Vyapin
The software gets stuck sometimes whilst migration and slows down.
Another choice for Top 10 Best Free Office 365 Reporting Tools (Pros and Cons) is Syskit. SysKit Point is a cloud based compliance management software which aids organizations with governance, analysis and auditing of Microsoft 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive. It provides detailed reporting for SharePoint and Office 365 with external sharing management and inactive content. It lets you keep track of office 365’s permission and memberships.
Pros of Syskit
It enables you to access report issues in real time from anywhere.
It exports Office 365 reports in Excel or PDF. This way, you can effortlessly schedule report delivery in your manager’s and auditor’s inbox.
Track user and admin actions, detect guest users and stop unauthorized file sharing.
It customizes your reporting using sturdy filters and even enables you to add or remove data anytime.
It eliminates the need for browsing performance management actions directly from a report.
Cons of Syskit
Users have to update every time there is a new release.
Users cannot see externally shared links that the recipient has never opened.
Solarwinds enable you to generate service-level agreement reports for Office 365 stakeholders. When you move your email to Office 365, you tend to improve availability. This way, you can monitor reports on the status and availability of your Office 365 portal, subscription, and security statistics.
Pros of Solarwinds
You can use Office 365 reporting tools to monitor exchange accounts effortlessly.
You can take immediate action on reports for adjusting licensing.
You can demonstrate compliance with Office 365 reports.
Last of our comparison of Top 10 Best Free Office 365 Reporting Tools (Pros and Cons) is Quest’s Enterprise Reporter . It assists you in ensuring the security of Azure Active Directory (AD), Azure resources, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive for business environments. It provides detailed and customizable reports that protect sensitive data and prepare for internal and external audits. This way, you tend to reduce IT workloads and ensure that the stakeholder has the information they need at any time.
Pros of Quest’s Enterprise Reporter
It improves security and compliance with visibility into critical IT asset configurations.
It also enhances permission management.
It manages the team and prevents group chaos in Office 365.
It can effortlessly optimize licenses and Azure resource consumption with increased visibility.
Cons of Quest’s Enterprise Reporter
It does not provide faster mounting restore points.
Top 10 Best Free Office 365 Reporting Tools Conclusion
Things to consider in the free Office 365 reporting tools is easiness of software implementation, improving operational efficiency and achieving better monitoring of the Office365 environment.
With top 10 free reporting tools you can effortlessly track time spent on projects for accurate resource allocation, client billing and future project planning too.
It is essential to consider and monitor deployment and operational risks early so that it is possible to modify plans when needed. The solution chosen should be adaptable to the company’s future requirements.
I am a fan of open source technology and have more than 10 years of experience working with Linux and Open Source technologies. I am one of the Linux technical writers for Cloud Infrastructure Services.