Productivity App Discovery is one of the new features delivered as part of the Advanced Security Management suite. It was announced few days back on Ignite, along with the App permissions feature. Now, the feature is already available and you can access it via the Security and Compliance center or directly in the ASM console.
Since I can hardly beat the level of detail presented on the Ignite session, I will just give you the quick summary. In a nutshell, Productivity App Discovery allows you to prepare a report with all the productivity related applications that are currently in use in your organization. It does that based on the logs collected by your corporate network’s firewall/proxy servers, which are uploaded to the service and parsed to filter out any interesting data. The report is then presented in the streamlined ASM UI so that you can examine it in detail.
In effect, Productivity App Discovery allows you to have a better understanding of which apps and services your users are using, thus allowing you some control over “shadow IT”. For example, you will be able to see just how many users are using Gmail or Box or Dropbox. You can get additional details as to the IP addresses, amount of data and so on. You can also compare this data to “snapshots” preserved from reports you have run in the past. As the price of the ASM suite stays the same, this new feature certainly a welcome addition.
To watch the presentation, get the slides or discuss the feature go to this thread on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Ignite-Content/BRK3249-Gain-visibility-and-control-with-Office-365-Advanced/m-p/9635#M150