Data from the Exchange Online Mailbox is available in two formats: on-screen and as a CSV file.
A new Attendance tab for Teams meeting data was announced in a message center released on June 7th. It's called a "reporting dashboard" by Microsoft, but it's really just a technique to present the attendance report data in a pleasant fashion. This information is only visible to the meeting organizer. The new tab is being rolled out to all tenants and should be available by the end of June.
The feature works for both regular Teams meetings and webinars run as Teams meetings, with the exception that webinar information includes registration and attendance data, making it easy for webinar organizers to see how many registered attendees showed up, if any unregistered people showed up, and so on.
Using data that already exists
Following the conclusion of a meeting, the attendance report is available. Prior to the introduction of the Attendance tab, a meeting organizer had to download the data as a CSV file and see it in an application like Excel. The CSV file has the exact same information as the attendance tab. When seen on a computer screen, everything simply appears better.
Attendance Reports in Multiple Instances
Meetings can be joined and left several times. When the meeting's organizer leaves, the meeting is over. The organizer, on the other hand, can restart a meeting and invite individuals back in. Teams generates a new version of the attendance report every time the organizer starts a meeting. A drop-down menu allows you to see all of the variants.
Teams uses data from the most recent version of the meeting when getting the CSV data for the attendance report from meeting details. Go to the meeting chat and download the material for the desired instance of the meeting from there to access prior versions.
You might wonder why Teams keeps meeting attendance data in Exchange Online. Teams, like other Microsoft 365 apps, already saves a variety of data in Exchange Online mailboxes, such as compliance records for chats and channel talks, as well as the text for meeting transcripts. By storing Teams data in mailboxes, Microsoft Search can index and search the information. This is a good illustration of the Microsoft 365 substrate in action: storing Teams data.
It appears like applying some fit and finish by shipping the GUI to display attendance data a few months after publishing the new format for the attendance report and introducing the opportunity to host a Teams meeting as a webinar. Nothing is wrong with that. It makes life more difficult for those who record how apps work, but the Office 365 for IT Pros team is up to the task!
