Microsoft Productivity Score vs presence tracking

Microsoft Productivity Score (now called Adoption Score) and presence tracking are not the same thing. 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 measures how an organization adopts Microsoft 365. It is a Microsoft 365 admin feature, and Adoption Score is its current name. It is designed to help an organization understand how it adopts and experiences Microsoft 365, so IT can improve rollout and training.

Adoption Score reports on people experiences: how the organization uses the tools across categories like communication, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, and mobility. Microsoft retired the separate technology experiences score (network connectivity, apps health, and endpoint analytics) in early 2026. The output is a set of category scores and trends with recommended actions, like "more people could collaborate in the cloud."

Two things are important to state plainly:

• It is organization-level. Microsoft states that all insights are calculated at the organizational level, not the individual level. After privacy concerns were raised at launch, Microsoft also removed the ability to see metrics attributed to named users. The scores are about the organization, not a scoreboard of employees.
• It is not a presence tracker. Productivity Score does not record whether a given person showed as available, away, busy, or offline at a given time. Presence is simply not what it is for.

What presence tracking measures

Presence tracking 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.

A presence tracker samples each person's status on a short, regular interval, records each change it sees, and turns the result into timelines and trends. You can then answer questions like these:

• Who was online last week, when, and for how long?
• How much of the day was this team showing as available?
• Does anyone's status stay green for hours without a single break?

We walk through the history question in more depth in how to see Teams status history.

The two side by side

The short version: Productivity Score tells you about the organization's relationship with the software. Presence tracking tells you about a person's presence pattern. Different altitude, different subject.

Which one do you actually want?

You want Productivity Score for adoption questions, and presence tracking for who's online, when, and for how long. Match the tool to the question.

• Want to know whether your rollout is landing, or whether people are collaborating in the cloud? That is Productivity Score (Adoption Score), and it already ships in your Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Want to see who's online, when, and for how long, spot presence that looks gamed, or bring a concrete timeline to a one-on-one? That is presence tracking, 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 tracking expecting an adoption dashboard, that is the wrong fit too.

Where Presify sits

Presify is a Microsoft Teams presence tracker, 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 and store each change. From that it builds presence timelines, online-time trends, and anomaly flags for presence that looks gamed, 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.
• Nothing to install. Setup is one read-only Microsoft sign-in by an admin, about five minutes. There is no agent 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. Guests are excluded, and Presify automatically excludes people whose Microsoft directory location is in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, or Canada.

Presence isn't productivity either

Neither tool measures how productive a person is, and it is worth being plain about the presence side. Presence history describes what someone's status showed, not why. The green dot is never the whole story. Someone can stay green all day and barely be around, and someone who always looks yellow may be doing their best work at 11pm.

So Presify gives you a directional read on when people are online and how much, and flags patterns worth a look. What you do with it starts with a conversation.

Per-user presence is also more personal than an organization-level score, so we handle it with care. Anomaly flags always show how they're calculated, and we recommend telling your team that presence is being tracked. Some states also have electronic-monitoring notice laws, such as Connecticut's prior written notice requirement; check with counsel whether one applies to you. For more on how we handle data, see our FAQ.

If the question is who's online, when, and for how long, see how Presify tracks Teams presence or start with one Microsoft sign-in. Setup takes about five minutes, and nothing gets installed.