Workplace Analytics March 2021 feature updates

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Last month, we used this space to announce Microsoft Viva Insights, part of the broader Microsoft Viva initiative that’s empowering and connecting employees in new ways in our evolving digital age. (You can this and other past blog articles here). In addition to Viva Insights, the Workplace Analytics team has introduced other feature updates over the past few weeks. Today’s update describes expanded support of worldwide languages in query results and the release of an R package for Workplace Analytics.

UTF-8 encoded characters allowed in metric names

Open-source R package for Workplace Analytics

UTF-8-encoded characters allowed in metric names

When you define a query, you select metrics and organizational-data attributes. After the query runs, its results are organized into columns and rows. The column headers in the results match the attribute names and metric names that you selected while defining the query.

Before this update, metric names that were in any character set other than Latin appeared garbled in column headers in query and OData output. This caused some customers to develop downstream apps or clients that anticipated and processed that output to make it consumable.

Now, this is no longer necessary. With this update, the names of metrics that you select while building a query can now be in any UTF-8 encoded character set – in other words, in the language of your choice.

In the following example of a query-result file that’s been opened in Excel, metric names that the customer input in Japanese have remained in Japanese, while attribute names were uploaded in English and remain in English:

For more information, see Supported languages for column headers.

Open-source R package for Workplace Analytics

The M365 Insights team is pleased to share the first open-source release of Workplace Analytics shareable code, the wpa R package.

Note: R is an open-source statistical programming language and one of the most popular toolkits for data analysis and data science. For users of the R language, a “package” is a unit of sharable code that’s organized into libraries.

The wpa R package is a flexible repository of more than 100 functions that provide pre-built analyses in a single curated package. With this release, customer and partner analysts can go beyond the popular insights that Power BI templates and Workplace Analytics queries make available. They can help leaders go deeper and solve more specific problems by defining, scoping, and executing custom analyses.

Analyst objectives

This R package can be used by analysts and data scientists who are intermediate-to-advanced users of R or Python. With the wpa package, an analyst can:

Run prebuilt analysis and visualizations of Workplace Analytics data with the ability to make settings to use organizational data variables and maintain privacy thresholds. They can easily export these outputs into any format required, including clipboard (copy & paste), Excel, .csv, and – for plots – .png, .svg, and .pdf.

Validate data prior to analysis by running a data validation report, which performs systematic checks on metrics, organizational attributes, and meeting subject lines. The data-validation functions promote good practices of checking for patterns such as public holidays, non-knowledge workers, outliers, and missing values in the data to improve the quality and reliability of analysis.

Generate prebuilt interactive HTML reports, which includes reports on data validation, subject-line text mining, and key collaboration metrics.

Leverage advanced analytics functions, such as text mining, network analysis, and hierarchical clustering, all designed specifically for Workplace Analytics metrics.