Attendance overview in Microsoft 365: who is in, who is working from home, who is out of office?
Attendance is not time tracking. What Microsoft 365 knows about presence, work location, and absence, how that becomes an overview, and what to consider regarding data protection.
In everyday use, “attendance overview” means two different things. One is time tracking: who clocked in when? The other is availability: who is in right now, who is working from home, whom can I call now? This post is about the second – and about what Microsoft 365 already provides for it.
Three signals Microsoft 365 knows
Presence status. Available, Busy, Away, Offline – derived from calendar, calls, and activity. It is live and needs no maintenance. What the colors mean exactly is explained in the post on the presence status in Teams.
Work location. In Outlook and Teams you can record per day whether you work in the office or remotely. Many hybrid teams now maintain this consistently because it makes the question “Are you in the office tomorrow?” unnecessary.
Absence. The out-of-office notice in Outlook switches the status to “Out of office” and includes the return date. For vacation, sickness, and business trips it is the most reliable source.
Add to that the profile data from the directory: department, office, job title, phone number.
Why there is still no overview
All three signals exist – but scattered. Teams shows the status per chat, Outlook the work location per person in the calendar, the directory the number on the profile card. For reception, the switchboard, or a team lead planning the day, there is no single place where it all comes together.
A presence dashboard closes exactly this gap: a board with all employees, per person status, status message, work location, phone number, department, and office. Filters by status (“only available”), by department, or by work location (“who is in the office today?”). In the browser, as an app in Teams, and in full-width mode for the monitor at reception.
Data protection: what matters
An attendance overview shows personal data. Three points should be clarified before rolling it out:
- Purpose and scope. It is about availability in everyday work, not about performance monitoring. A presence dashboard shows the moment, not a history. TeamsDashboard does not store presence or profile data on its own servers – it is loaded directly from Microsoft 365 and only displayed in the browser.
- Visibility. Not every organization wants everyone to see everyone. Through Microsoft 365 groups you define who may use the dashboard and who appears on it – for example only the site or only the service areas.
- Contractual basis. A provider that processes data on your behalf needs a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR. With TeamsDashboard it is published in full and signed in the customer portal with one click; operations run in Frankfurt.
Where there is a works council, the topic belongs on the table early. The arguments are good: no tracking, no analysis, the same data that is visible in Teams anyway – just in one place.
First step
The live demo shows the dashboard with sample data, without sign-in. For your own organization there are 14 days free, no credit card; an administrator grants access once, and from then on everyone has the overview.