Microsoft 365 management, reporting, and auditing - ManageEngine M365 Manager Plus (2024)

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OneDrive for Business plays a major role in empowering users to work from home. As a file sharing and collaboration service, it is important to keep track of all the file accesses and changes to maintain the integrity of files.

Auditing OneDrive for Business file accesses with Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 Admin Center does not provide any built-in reports that help to keep track of file accesses and changes. You need to head over to the Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center to search the unified audit logs for the required data. The drawbacks in using this unified audit logs are:

• The audit data has to be fetched on demand which takes quite a lot of time depending on the amount of records, adding to the workload of administrators.
• The number of predefined reports available are limited.
• Audit logs older than 180 days will be automatically purged,which complicates the security and compliance requirements.

Real-time OneDrive for business auditing with M365 Manager Plus.

M365 Manager Plus comes with more than 500 built-in real-time audit reports. To view the default OneDrive for Business audit reports,

1. Go to the Audit tab.
2. Select OneDrive for Business in the left pane and choose the audit report of your choice.
3. You can filter the audit data based on business hours, domains or other attributes as per your needs.

If the default audit profiles do not fit your needs, you can,

1. Create your own audit profiles.
2. Create your own audit report views.

Advantages of M365 Manager Plus over native Microsoft 365:

• Long-term historical data:In native Microsoft 365, there are limits to how long you can retrieve historical data based on the data being audited. M365 Manager Plus stores audit data indefinitely to maintain complete records.
• Real-time auditing: Instead of gathering the associated data for audit reports each time, M365 Manager Plus keeps audit reports updated in real time.
• Profile-based auditing: Instead of having to peruse the entire list of audit reports to find the right one (as is required in Microsoft 365), M365 Manager Plus lets you create your own profiles so you can view only those audit details you need to see.
• Group-based auditing: While auditing Azure Active Directory, M365 Manager Plus lets you generate reports for user activities based on group membership. Native Microsoft 365 is not able to audit based on group membership.
• Advanced filtering:In native Microsoft 365, you can only filter logs based on certain attribute values. With M365 Manager Plus, filter your logs based on any attribute and perform multi-valued searches as needed.
• Custom views:While Microsoft 365 doesn't support custom views, with M365 Manager Plus you can create your own custom views to see filtered data, summarized data or summarized data that is filtered.[Learn more]
• Business hours auditing:Microsoft 365 doesn't support restricted time frame auditing, but M365 Manager Plus lets you retrieve audit details based on business hours or a specific period of time. [Learn more]
• Export data: In native Microsoft 365, you can only export data to CSV. But in M365 Manager Plus, you can export audit data to PDF, XLSX, HTML, or CSV.