Microsoft Productivity Score vs presence analytics
People often ask whether Microsoft Productivity Score and presence analytics are the same thing. They are not. They measure different things, at different levels, for different questions. Confusing them leads to the wrong tool and, sometimes, the wrong conversation with your team. Here is a clear, fair breakdown of both, and how to tell which one you actually want.
What Microsoft Productivity Score measures
Productivity Score is a Microsoft 365 admin feature. It is designed to help an organization understand how it adopts and experiences Microsoft 365, so IT can improve rollout, training, and technology health.
It reports across two areas. The people experiences side looks at how the organization uses the tools: content collaboration, communication, meetings, teamwork, and mobility. The technology experiences side looks at the health of the environment: endpoint performance, network connectivity, and which apps are in use. The output is a set of category scores and trends with suggested actions, like "more people could collaborate in the cloud" or "these devices have long startup times."
Two things are important to state plainly. First, Productivity Score is an organization-level measure. After privacy concerns were raised when it launched, Microsoft removed the ability to see metrics attributed to individual named users in the people-experiences view. The scores are about the organization, not a scoreboard of employees. Second, Productivity Score is not a presence tracker. It does not record whether a given person showed as available, away, busy, or offline at a given time. That is simply not what it is for.
What presence analytics measures
Presence analytics is a different lens. It is per-user presence history: the available, away, busy, and offline states that Microsoft Teams shows as a colored dot, recorded over time so you can look back at them.
Teams itself shows only the current dot. It has no built-in history. Presence analytics captures each change as it happens and turns it into timelines and trends, so you can answer questions like "what did this person's status look like across last week" or "how much of the day was this team showing as available." We walk through the history question in more depth in how to see Teams status history.
The two side by side
| Feature | Microsoft Productivity Score | Presence analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | How well does the org adopt and run Microsoft 365? | What did each person's Teams status look like over time? |
| Level | Organization (not individual) | Per user |
| Measures | Adoption, collaboration, meeting and comms usage, device and network health | Available / away / busy / offline states over time |
| Source | Aggregated Microsoft 365 usage and device signals | The Teams presence state via the Graph presence API |
| Privacy posture | User-level people-experiences view de-identified by Microsoft after launch | Per-user by design, so consent and responsible use matter |
The short version: Productivity Score tells you about the organization's relationship with the software. Presence analytics tells you about a person's presence pattern. Different altitude, different subject.
Which one do you actually want?
Match the tool to the question.
- Want to know whether your rollout is landing, whether people are collaborating in the cloud, or whether slow devices are hurting the experience? That is Productivity Score, and it already ships in your Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Want to see presence patterns over time, spot a recurring gap, or bring concrete timelines to a conversation about availability? That is presence analytics, and it is not something Productivity Score provides.
If you reach for Productivity Score expecting presence history, you will not find it. If you reach for presence analytics expecting an adoption dashboard, that is the wrong fit too.
Where Presify sits
Presify is presence analytics, and only that. We want to be exact about it: Presify is not Microsoft Productivity Score and does not use it. We do not read its scores, and we do not produce adoption or device-health metrics.
What Presify does is read the Teams presence state through the Microsoft Graph presence API on a short, regular interval, store each change, and build presence timelines, online-time trends, and anomaly flags, per person and per team. A few things we hold to:
- Read-only and minimal. Presify reads presence plus the basic directory fields it needs to label and scope users. It never touches message content, chats, calls, files, or calendars.
- No agents. Setup is a one-time, read-only Microsoft admin consent. There is nothing to install on anyone's device.
- Tenant-isolated and US-based. Your data is scoped to your Microsoft tenant and processed on US infrastructure. More detail lives on our security page.
- Bounded retention you control. History is trimmed automatically by your plan, and per-user and workspace-wide deletion are built in. Guest users are excluded, and we do not monitor users in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, or Canada.
A word on responsible use
Per-user presence is more sensitive than an organization-level score, which is exactly why Microsoft de-identified the user view of Productivity Score. We take the same care. Presence history describes what someone's status showed, not why, so we treat it as evidence for a conversation, not a verdict. Anomaly flags always show the math behind them, and we recommend telling your team that presence is being kept. For more on how we handle data, see our FAQ.
If presence patterns are the question you are trying to answer, see how Presify works or start with one Microsoft sign-in.