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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Leverage Office 365 to increase your organization's efficiency
Key Features
- Perform common to advanced-level management and administrative tasks for your organization with Office 365
- Become an Office 365 generalist who can work with the entire stack—not just specific products
- An advanced-level guide that will teach you to implement enterprise-level services into your organization, no matter the size of the business
Book Description
In today's world, every organization aims to migrate to the cloud in order to become more efficient by making full use of the latest technologies. Office 365 is your one-stop solution to making your organization reliable, scalable, and fast.
This book will start with an overview of Office 365 components, and help you learn how to use the administration portal, and perform basic administration. It then goes on to cover common management tasks, such as managing users, admin roles, groups, securing Office 365, and enforcing compliance. In the next set of chapters, you will learn about topics including managing Skype for Business Online, Yammer, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. In the final section of the book, you will learn how to carry out reporting and monitor Office 365 service health.
By the end of this book, you will be able to implement enterprise-level services with Office 365 based on your organization's needs.
What you will learn
- Understand the vast Office 365 feature set
- Understand how workloads and applications interact and integrate with each other
- Connect PowerShell to various Office 365 services and perform tasks
- Manage Skype for Business Online
- Get support and monitor Office 365 service health
- Manage and administer identities and groups efficiently
Who this book is for
This book targets architects, sys admins, engineers, and administrators who are working with Office 365 and are responsible for configuring, implementing, and managing Office 365 in their organization. A prior knowledge of Office 365 and Exchange servers is mandatory.
Thomas Carpe is a founder and managing principal of Liquid Mercury Solutions, a Baltimore-based Microsoft Gold partner specializing in Azure, Office 365, and SharePoint since 2009. He's been working with SharePoint since 2001, with Microsoft technology for over 20 years. He has several Microsoft certificates, including MCPD, MCSE, and MCITP. He is an acknowledged expert in SharePoint security, and he is the author of a large open source library and several software products built on SharePoint. He resides in Baltimore with his wife, children, housemates, and a menagerie of pets. Nikkia Carter, director of collaboration and training for C3 Integrated Solutions, a Microsoft Gold & Silver partner in VA, has a bachelor's in computer science, a master's in IT project management, and is a CompTIA Certified Technical Trainer. She is a solutions developer, strategist, trainer, and tech speaker. She is a member of the Microsoft Voices for Innovation taskforce and of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners DC board. She also leads the SharePoint User Group DC. Alara Rogers, not to be confused with Buck Rogers or Mr. Rogers, is often thought to be a brain in a tank, but this is not true; she is a space alien. Alara grew up in the land of IBM near Poughkeepsie, NY, and entered IT via database marketing and analytics. She has a bachelor's in psychobiology from the University of Pennsylvania. Nowadays, her main interests are business intelligence, process management, information architecture, and SharePoint as a platform for the rest. She writes science fiction in her spare time, and has been known to reply at length when someone is wrong on the internet.Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 462
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Mastering Office 365 Administration
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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Commissioning Editor: Vijin Boricha Acquisition Editor: Meeta RajaniContent Development Editor: Sharon RajTechnical Editor:Khushbu SutarCopy Editors:Safis Editing, Dipti Mankame Project Coordinator:Virginia DiasProofreader: Safis EditingIndexer: Pratik ShirodkarGraphics: Tom ScariaProduction Coordinator: Aparna Bhagat
First published: May 2018
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ISBN 978-1-78728-863-8
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Contributors
About the authors
Thomas Carpe is a founder and managing principal of Liquid Mercury Solutions, a Baltimore-based Microsoft Gold partner specializing in Azure, Office 365, and SharePoint since 2009. He's been working with SharePoint since 2001, with Microsoft technology for over 20 years. He has several Microsoft certificates, including MCPD, MCSE, and MCITP. He is an acknowledged expert in SharePoint security, and he is the author of a large open source library and several software products built on SharePoint. He resides in Baltimore with his wife, children, housemates, and a menagerie of pets.
Nikkia Carter, director of collaboration and training for C3 Integrated Solutions, a Microsoft Gold & Silver partner in VA, has a bachelor's in computer science, a master's in IT project management, and is a CompTIA Certified Technical Trainer. She is a solutions developer, strategist, trainer, and tech speaker. She is a member of the Microsoft Voices for Innovation taskforce and of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners DC board. She also leads the SharePoint User Group DC.
Alara Rogers, not to be confused with Buck Rogers or Mr. Rogers, is often thought to be a brain in a tank, but this is not true; she is a space alien. Alara grew up in the land of IBM near Poughkeepsie, NY, and entered IT via database marketing and analytics. She has a bachelor's in psychobiology from the University of Pennsylvania. Nowadays, her main interests are business intelligence, process management, information architecture, and SharePoint as a platform for the rest. She writes science fiction in her spare time, and has been known to reply at length when someone is wrong on the internet.
About the reviewers
Markus Darda is the owner of DaComp GmbH (Switzerland). As a senior engineer and architect, he works for enterprise customers all over Europe designing and implementing Citrix and Microsoft environments.
He also has a lot of experience in migrating customers to Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. In the past, Markus has also reviewed the following books for Packt:
Hyper-V Network Virtualization Cookbook
Citrix XenApp® 7.5 Desktop Virtualization Solutions
Getting Started with Citrix XenApp® 7.6
Citrix has named Markus as Subject Matter Expert (SME) on several products.
Shadeed Eleazer is a navy veteran and reputation management and social selling thought leader who is an architect of the official state websites of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, powered by Microsoft SharePoint technologies. He is an Amazon best selling author. He specializes in on-premises to cloud migrations, enterprise social media, instructional systems design, and training. He is the founder of Managed Path Solutions, a Microsoft partner focused on the support of Microsoft technology platforms.
Packt is searching for authors like you
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Mastering Office 365 Administration
Packt Upsell
Why subscribe?
PacktPub.com
Contributors
About the authors
About the reviewers
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
Reviews
The Office 365 Administration Portal
The dashboard
Dashboard components
DirSync Status
Users
Billing
Office software
Domains
Support
Windows 10 Upgrade
Videos
Message center
Service health
Setup guides
Active users
Dashboard summary
The left sidebar navigation menu
Users
Active users
Adding a user
Using the user panel
Views
Import multiple users
Contacts
Guest users
Deleted users
Groups
Groups
Shared mailboxes
Resources
Rooms and equipment
Sites
Public website
Billing
Subscriptions
Bills
Licenses
Purchase services
Billing notifications
Support
Customer lockbox request
Settings
The Services & add-ins page
The Security & privacy settings
DirSync errors
Organization profile
Partner relationships
Setup
Products
Domains
Data migration
Reports
Usage
The Security & compliance option
Health
Administrative portals for individual services
Summary
Using PowerShell to Connect to Office 365 Services
Software prerequisites
Core components
Supporting modules
Other useful downloads
Connecting to your Office 365 tenant
Using predefined credentials to connect
Connecting to Exchange Online
Connecting to SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online Management Shell
Client-side object model
SharePoint REST API
Legacy SharePoint web services, WebDAV, and FrontPage Server Extensions
Other tools and frameworks
Connecting to Skype for Business
Connecting to other services
Connecting to customer tenants using delegated access
Exchange Online delegated
Skype for Business delegated
SharePoint Online delegated
Connecting to multiple services in a single session
Important security tips
Summary
Administering Azure Active Directory
Interacting with Azure AD
Office 365 portal
Azure portal
Azure AD PowerShell module
Managing Office 365 users
Finding existing users
Creating and managing custom views
Getting users information with PowerShell
Onboarding users
Adding a single User
Adding bulk users
Using PowerShell to add users
Working with user settings
Uploading a photo
Changing a user's login name or email address
Updating contact information
Enabling or disabling login
Resetting passwords
Adjusting the user's licenses
Assigning groups
Managing admin roles
Email-centric user and group features
Offboarding users
Deleting a user in the portal
The user recycle bin
Alternative strategies to deleting a user
Disabling user login
Converting to a shared mailbox
Downloading the mailbox to a PST
Switching to archive license
Acquiring a third-party backup solution
Using mailbox retention (in-place hold)
DLP
Safeguarding
Advanced topics
DNS domains
Adding and configuring a DNS domain
Authorization stage
Integration stage
Cutover Stage
Configuring DNS with PowerShell
Managing external guest users
Integrating with your on-premises user directory
Available integration options
Windows Essentials Experience
AD Connect (also known as AD Sync or Directory Sync)
AD FS
Mixed systems
Alternative options
How AD integration affects the new user creation process
AD and your DNS domains
Adding a UPN suffix to your domain
Changing the UPN for each Windows user
Summary
Administering Exchange Online – Essentials
The dashboard
Recipients
Mailboxes
Editing the user mailbox
The mailbox usage tab
The email address tab
The mailbox features tab
The mailbox delegation tab
Creating a user mailbox
Groups
Creating and editing groups
Creating a distribution Group
Editing a distribution group
Creating a dynamic distribution list
Editing a dynamic distribution group
Creating or editing a security group
Creating an Office 365 Group
Editing an Office 365 Group
Resources
Creating a resource
Contacts
Shared mailboxes
The migration tab
The permissions tab
The compliance management tab
The organization tab
The protection tab
Advanced threats
The mail flow tab
The rules tab
Creating a rule
Rule conditions
Rule actions
Other rule settings
Rules from template
The message trace tab
URL trace
The accepted domains tab
The remote domains tab
The connectors tab
The mobile tab
The public folders, unified messaging, and hybrid tabs
Summary
Administering Exchange – Advanced Topics
Mail migration
Remote move migration
Staged migration
Cutover migration
IMAP migration
Migration from Exchange Online
More details
Permissions
Admin roles
User roles
Outlook Web Access policies
Compliance management
In-place eDiscovery and Hold
Auditing
Data loss prevention
Retention policies and retention tags
Journal rules
Organization
Sharing
Add-ins
Protection
Malware filter
Connection filter 
Spam filter
Outbound spam
Quarantine
Action center 
DKIM
Advanced threats
Safe attachments
Safe links
Organization policy
Specific recipient policy
Mobile
Mobile device access
Mobile device mailbox policies
Summary
Administering SharePoint Online
General overview of SharePoint
Administering via the SharePoint admin center
Getting to the SharePoint admin center
Managing the site collections
Creating new site collections
Deleting site collections
The infopath option
The user profiles option
The sharing option
The Sharing outside your organization setting
The Who can share outside your organization setting
The Default link type setting
The Default link permission setting
The Additional settings option
The Notifications settings
The settings option
The Show or Hide Options setting
The Site Collection Storage Management setting
The OneDrive for Business experience setting
The SharePoint Lists and Libraries experience setting
The Admin Center experience setting
The Office Graph setting
The Enterprise Social Collaboration setting
The Streaming Video Service setting
The Site Pages setting
The Global Experience Version Settings setting
The Information Rights Management (IRM) setting
The Site Creation setting
The Subsite Creation setting
The Custom Script setting
The Preview Features setting
The Connected Services setting
The Access apps setting
The Mobile Push Notifications – OneDrive for Business setting
The Mobile Push Notifications – SharePoint setting
The Comment on Site Pages setting
The access control option
Administering via PowerShell
Administering SharePoint Online via SharePoint
Permission levels and groups
Roles and responsibilities
Some words of wisdom
Summary
Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams Administration
An overview of Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups
Inside Office 365 Groups
Microsoft Teams
Things to keep in mind
Administering Office 365 Groups via Office 365 Groups settings
Creating a new Office 365 group
Administering Teams via Office 365 admin center
Administering via PowerShell
Administering via PowerShell administration for Office 365 Groups
PowerShell administration for Microsoft Teams
Summary
Understanding Security and Compliance
Security & Compliance overview
Permissions
Service assurance
Configuring Security & Compliance settings
Assigning permissions to non-IT staff
Security assurance information
Alerts
Alerts dashboard
View alerts
Alert policies
Classifications
Labels
Creating a label
Auto-applying labels
Publishing labels
Label policies
Sensitive information types
Data loss prevention
DLP policy
App permissions and device management
Data governance
Dashboard
Explorer
Import
Threat management
Dashboard
Review
Policy
Data privac
GDPR dashboard
DSR cases
Search & investigation
Content search
Audit log search
eDiscovery
Creating a case
Managing cases
Core versus advanced
Search
Hold
Productivity app discovery
Security & Compliance reports
Reports dashboard
Scheduled reports
Downloadable reports
Security score card
Summary
Administering Skype for Business
Configuring organization-wide settings 
Audio conferencing
Microsoft bridge
Microsoft bridge settings  
Audio conferencing users 
Managing Skype for Business users 
General user settings
User settings for external communications 
User voice settings 
Audio conferencing user settings 
Online meetings 
Meeting invites 
Broadcast meetings 
Managing voice services and calling plans 
A word about licenses and costs
Obtaining and assigning phone numbers 
Providing emergency locations 
Configuring voice users 
Call routing 
The auto attendants service 
The general info section
The hours of operation section
Business hours and after hours call handling 
Holidays
Dial scope 
Call queues
Advanced topics for call routing
Text-to-speech
Routing calls to external phone services 
A brief word about offboarding users 
Advanced telephony services 
Number portability 
Have a copy of your old phone bill 
Know whether you need a manual port 
Be patient, very patient 
If this is a main number, be prepared to act quickly 
User numbers versus service numbers 
What if you get a user number by mistake? 
Caller ID 
The problem with caller ID 
Potential solutions for inaccurate caller ID data 
People see my desk number when I call them 
Phones and other third-party products 
Hybrid environments 
Running a call center 
Summary 
Administering Yammer
Overview
Administrating via Office 365
Getting to the Yammer admin center
Managing user licenses
Getting started
Setting a usage policy
Writing a welcome message
Network
Users
Content and Security
Administering via PowerShell
Summary
Administering OneDrive for Business
OneDrive dashboard
Sharing
Sync
Storage
The Device access page
Device access
Mobile application management
Compliance
Notifications
Accessing the files of terminated employees
Manager access
Administrator access
Summary
Power BI Administration
Administering via Office 365
Usage metrics
Users
Audit logs
Tenant settings
Capacity settings
Embed Codes
Organization visuals
Administering using PowerShell
Where to get more information
Summary
Administering PowerApps, Flow, Stream, and Forms
Defining PowerApps, Flow, Stream, and Forms
PowerApps
Flow
Stream
Forms
Administering PowerApps and Flow
Environments
The Security tab
The Resources tab
The Database tab
Data policies
Data integration
Tenant
Stream
Manage streams
Administrators
Spotlight videos
Company policies
Usage details
Groups
Support
Comments
Manage users
Content creation
Outside the Stream admin portal
View in admin mode
Forms
Summary
Usage Reporting
How useful are usage reports?
What reports are included?
The dashboard
Office 365
Activations
Active users
Office 365 Groups activity
Exchange
Email activity
Email app usage
Mailbox usage
OneDrive and SharePoint
OneDrive and SharePoint activity
OneDrive and SharePoint usage
Skype for Business
Skype for Business activity
Peer-to-peer activity, conference organized, and participant activity
Device usage
PSTN (Telephone) usage
Users blocked
Session details
Teams and Yammer
Microsoft Teams User activity
Microsoft Teams Device Usage
What the heck happened to Yammer?
Yammer activity
Yammer device usage
Yammer groups activity report
Advanced reporting topics
Anonymizing user data
Power BI Content Pack
User count by Geo
Security & Compliance
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
Office 365 is one of Microsoft's most popular cloud offerings, a low-cost service that people subscribe to in order to access various Microsoft services and software. It is the replacement of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Microsoft's previous cloud offering. It is free or super-low-cost, depending on the subscription, for 501(c)3 nonprofits and accredited educational institutions.
Office 365 is securely accessible anywhere with a supported device and an internet connection, and is independently verified to comply with regulations such as FedRAMP, FISMA, HIPAA, ISO 27001, EU, and others, with over 900 controls that enable keeping compliant never-changing industry standards. Office 365 has a financially backed guarantee of 99.9% uptime.
As such, Office 365 is constantly being updated due to customer feedback and Microsoft's desire to offer evergreen and best-in-class services. Due to this, they are constantly updating and improving the service, as well as offering new services.
Who this book is for
This book is for those who are new to Office 365 administration, or may have worked with it for a while but are looking to verify their knowledge and take their skills to the next level. This book illustrates administration from the basics to more advanced topics.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Office 365 Administration Portal, introduces the reader to the Office 365 admin portal.
Chapter 2, Using PowerShell to Connect to Office 365 Services, enables you to connect PowerShell to various Office 365 services and perform tasks.
Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory, helps you manage and administer various identities and groups.
Chapter 4, Administering Exchange Online - Essentials, covers the basics of administering Exchange Online—mailboxes and rules/message management.
Chapter 5, Administering Exchange - Advanced Topics, covers all the more advanced and/or obscure parts of Exchange Online administration.
Chapter 6, Administering SharePoint Online, introduces the reader to the SharePoint admin portal and other SharePoint administration techniques needed to manage SharePoint, including some PowerShell.
Chapter 7, Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams Administration, introduces the reader to administering Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams through the Office 365 admin portal and through PowerShell.
Chapter 8, Understanding Security and Compliance, shows how to secure Office 365 and enforce compliance, and help you manage security, create permissions, and enforce compliance.
Chapter 9, Administering Skype for Business, teaches the reader how to manage the instant messaging, voice, and video components of Skype for Business.
Chapter 10, Administering Yammer, introduces the reader to the Yammer admin portal. Some administration through PowerShell is also included.
Chapter 11, Administering OneDrive for Business, covers everything the reader needs to manage OneDrive for Business for their users.
Chapter 12, Power BI Administration, introduces the reader to the Power BI admin portal.
Chapter 13, Administering PowerApps, Flow, Stream, and Forms, introduces the reader to various new products available in Office 365, what they are useful for, and how to administer them.
Chapter 14, Usage Reporting, shows how to get support and monitor the service health of Office 365.
To get the most out of this book
The topics in this book assume that you have some knowledge of Office 365 and have used it as an end user. We assume that you know what the main components are in Office 365. We also assume that you are not already an advanced administrator of Office 365 who is looking for a book entirely comprising master's-level topics and techniques. Although, in some chapters, some techniques are of the master's level, most range from basic to advanced skills.
In order to perform the techniques in this book, we suggest setting up an Office 365 tenant that you can play around with before applying your newly acquired skills to your actual organizational tenant.
You can sign up for a free 30-day trial tenant at https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans. We highly recommend signing up for the E3 or E5 subscription and making yourself the global administrator (this happens automatically if you sign up with your info). You may also want to set up multiple users at different administration levels to test them out. You get 25 user licenses with every trial. You will also need PowerShell, SharePoint Online PowerShell, and Exchange PowerShell in order to execute the scripts.
Download the example code files
You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.
You can download the code files by following these steps:
Log in or register at
www.packtpub.com
.
Select the
SUPPORT
tab.
Click on
Code Downloads & Errata
.
Enter the name of the book in the
Search
box and follow the onscreen instructions.
Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:
WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux
The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Office-365-Administration. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.
We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/MasteringOffice365Administration_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Now that you're connected, you can use commands such as Get-Mailbox and Get-MailUser."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Connect-MsolService -Credential $Credentials
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "You can click on the carat beside Advanced settings for shareable links to open up additional options."
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The Office 365 Administration Portal
While there's more than one way to perform most administrative functions in Office 365, the majority of administrators will find that most tasks can be performed conveniently and easily by using the Office 365 administration portal. In this chapter, we're going to go through the different parts of the main portal, and very briefly touch on the functions of the individual administration sites accessible from the portal, since most of those are covered in other parts of this book.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
The dashboard
The left sidebar's navigation
Administrative portals for individual services
The dashboard
You can access the administration portal from any Office 365 site, including the main site at https://portal.office.com, by clicking on the apps icon in the top-left corner that looks like a tic-tac-toe board to get your list of apps, and then selecting Admin. But if you are going to be visiting the portal a lot, which is normal for anyone who has Office 365 administration as one of their general job duties, you might want to bookmark it directly. The direct link for it is https://portal.office.com/adminportal. However you choose to get there, the first thing you're going to see is the Office 365 administration dashboard.
Clicking on the apps icon opens your list of apps and allows you to access the portal by clicking on Admin:
You cannot access everything that you can do in the Office 365 administration portal through the dashboard. On the left-hand side, there's a side navigation bar with expandable headings that grants access to the rest of the portal's functionality. There's also a heading at the bottom of the side navigation that shows all of the main administrative centers for Office 365. Those administrative centers will be covered in their own separate chapters.
Dashboard components
Dashboard components aren't necessarily identical between tenants. For instance, the one in the preceding example has a section for Windows 10 Upgrade, because this particular dashboard belongs to a tenant that has purchased a Windows 10 subscription product. My company's portal doesn't have the Videos section, but rather, a Train yourself section that shows links for training for admins and for end users.
We'll go over the components that you'd generally expect to find in most tenant dashboards.
DirSync Status
You'll only see this dashboard component if you're using Active Directory (AD) synchronization, either to an Azure Active Directory or on-premises. This dashboard component quickly tells you when the last directory sync was done, when the last password sync was done, and if either of them had any errors. Clicking on this component takes you to the same place you'd get to via the side navigation bar if you clicked Health | Directory Sync Status.
Users
You'll probably use Users more often than any other component. The Users dashboard component takes you to the same place as Users | Active Users on the side navigation bar. There are also direct links for adding, deleting, and editing users, and resetting passwords.
We'll go into more detail on the functions available in the Active Users area when we cover the side navigation bar, and even more in Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory.
Billing
This component takes you directly to the Subscriptions link area under Billing | Subscriptions. It's important to note that the subscriptions you see here are the ones you've ordered directly from Microsoft. If you're purchasing Office 365 through a partner, you might not see anything here.
Some Office 365 customers purchase services through Microsoft, and others through the partnership Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. Some do both. If you buy any subscriptions from Microsoft, you'll see them under Billing, but any that you buy through a reseller will only appear in Licenses.
There are levels of administrator access that give you the ability to use the portal to maintain services, but not to interact with the financial end. If your level of administrator access doesn't give you billing access, you might not see this dashboard component.
Office software
It might seem strange to you that downloading Office software is an administrative component on the dashboard. Doesn't downloading your own software seem like something you do as a user, rather than as an administrator? The truth is, administrators are more likely to interact with the administration portal than they are with the Office 365 home page, where you'd normally find your software download link.
Clicking on the name of the component takes you to the my software download page, which you'd otherwise access via the Office 365 end user home page. It's not part of the administration portal at all at that point. But there are also links on the component for various administrative functions that have to do with Office software installation:
Install my software
: This is, confusingly,
not
the link that takes you to a place to install your own software. It's actually a link for setting up manual deployment of software for the users in your company. If there are any issues with internet speed (or worse, metering) at the physical offices where your users work, we highly recommend following the instructions here to perform a manual deployment, as it lets you get away with performing the download once
,
rather than once per user. That's outside of the scope of this book, but Microsoft provides instructions right on the
Manually deploy user software
popup.
Share the download link
: This opens an email in your default mail client, which has the link to the Office software download page in it.
Software download settings
: Here, you can exert some control over what software your users can install for themselves. At one point, the options included Office 2013 products, but they've been discontinued for most customers as of February 2017:
For PC, you can choose to block or allow the Office suite as a whole, the extra products that don't come with the Office suite (
Project and Visio)
, SharePoint Designer, and standalone Skype for Business. You can also choose whether your users get upgrades to Office every month or every 6 months.
For macOS, you can block or allow Office itself, additional Office applications that need separate downloads, and Skype for Business.
Troubleshoot installation
: This opens a link on Microsoft's
Office 365 Admin Help
, covering how to deal with installations gone wrong.
Domains
This component takes you to the same place as Setup | Domains on the left-side navigation pane. The direct link options are Add a domain, Delete a domain, Edit a domain, and Check health, which checks on the DNS status of the domains you own.
It's a good idea, if you're not frequently looking at the advanced DNS options in your domain name provider, to occasionally check your DNS health. We've seen DNS entries that were placed when a domain was first migrated disappear from the clients' domain name provider, on occasion. This is particularly likely if your company has just migrated to a new provider or brought on a new website host, or has undergone other circumstances that could lead to changes to your domain. Office 365 is pretty robust, and in many cases, it will continue to work if domain name entries are wrong; but it won't necessarily work well.
More detailed information on how to configure DNS is covered in Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory.
Support
The header of this component is not a link, and it won't do anything when you click on it. The options provided are New service request and View service requests, both of which can be accessed from the side navigation pane, under Support.
Windows 10 Upgrade
You'll see this component if your company has purchased any licenses for Windows 10 through the Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5 subscription model. This is another component where the header itself doesn't go anywhere. The options within are Install Upgrade, Share the download link, Create installation media, and Troubleshoot installation. Except for Share the download link, which creates an email the same way the similar function did under Office software, all of these link to locations on Microsoft's websites and will take you out of the administration portal.
The functions of this component can't be accessed through the side navigation pane.
Videos
This component displays quick links to Microsoft training videos for various functions in the administration portal. If your company is a Microsoft partner or has purchased training services from Microsoft, you might see this as a component that invites you to train yourself or your end users; if that's the case, the material that's normally under Videos will be under Train yourself. For most tenants, however, what you'll see is the Videos component.
Message center
This is, sadly, more important than you might realize. Microsoft has, in recent years, been very assertive about shutting down software products, applications, and options that some businesses have come to rely on. The Message center is where announcements of new products and downgrades or retirements of older products will appear, and if you don't stay abreast of what Microsoft is doing, you might find yourself blindsided. The Message center is also accessible under Health | Message center in the side navigation pane.
Service health
When you click on this component, you'll be taken to the same place you could access from Health | Service health. It'll show you all of the Office 365 services and their health statuses, with incidents and advisories. The component will also allow you to jump directly to lists of incidents or advisories, with links that show how many services may be affected by either type of warning. Checking this on a regular basis is a good way to stay on top of issues with Office 365 before your users complain.
Setup guides
This component contains wizards, deployment advisors, and setup guides for various Office 365 products. Clicking directly on the header takes you to an overview page containing all of the wizards and guides. There's an option in the component and in the overview page called Setup guidance, which provides even more detailed guidance on setting up your Office 365 services, and there are direct links to the various setup guides and wizards that you can scroll through from directly within the component.
You'd expect that such extensive setup guidance would be accessible from the sidebar navigation, perhaps under Setup, but as of the time of writing, the dashboard component seems to be the only way to access this.
Active users
This shows a small version of the Active users graph from Reports | Usage (which is where you get to if you click on the header of this component), so you can get a sense of your company's Office 365 usage at a glance. The usage reports that you'll see upon clicking it show more detailed breakdowns of the various activities.
Dashboard summary
We've gone through the dashboard components that most administrators will see, but it's important to remember that these components change depending on what products your company has purchased, and Microsoft is also constantly changing its Office 365 offerings, expanding what's available, and occasionally pruning back older services. The dashboard I see today might not be one hundred percent identical to the dashboard you will see by the time this book reaches your hands, because this dashboard is one of the first places Microsoft will add new features to the administration portal, even before they're added to the sidebar navigation pane.
Now, let's turn our attention to the left sidebar. There's a lot of functionality in this navigation tree that can't be accessed any other way, and we'll go into a bit more detail on some of the functions we already touched on when they were also reachable from the dashboard.
The left sidebar navigation menu
Like many modern left sidebar navigation trees, this menu will collapse down to a narrow column of icons if you click the left-pointing carat on the right side of the bar, but the default on most browsers is for it to be full-sized. On mobile, you might find that it defaults to being minimized. (It's also small enough to be almost unreadable on a phone. I'd recommend that if you're going to be using mobile devices to access administrative functions more than occasionally, you should probably get the Office 365 admin app, available for iOS, Android, and Windows mobile. But a discussion of that app is outside the scope of this book.)
Users
The options under Users are Active users, Contacts, Guest users, and Deleted users.
Active users
There's a lot you can do in Active users, and you're going to be doing a lot of it. Interacting with your active users—adding new ones, disabling terminated ones, resetting passwords, and adding and removing licenses—is the bulk of the work that most Office 365 administrators do:
The top bar for Active users gives you the options to add a user, change which users you're viewing, search users, export your list of users to CSV, and other functions, available under the More drop-down menu.
Again, the options you see here may vary, depending on what products you have (you won't see an option for Directory synchronization if you're not syncing Office 365 to Active Directory, for instance).
The most common activities are adding a user and resetting passwords (particularly if you don't sync to Active Directory), but a dynamic, quickly changing company may also have a lot of setting licenses to do. We'll go over those functions and how to work with the views of your users (a vital skill, if you're a large company with a lot of users) in some detail. Most of the other functions are fairly self-explanatory.
We'll go over much of this information again in Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory, drilling down into PowerShell and some of its more obscure details.
Adding a user
To add a user, you'll enter the user's First name and Last name, and this will assemble the Display name by default. If you want the display name to be something different than the first and last names, change it after it populates by default; this won't affect the first or last names:
Most instances of Office 365 have more than one domain, but usually, one's the real domain, and one's domain.onmicrosoft.com, which hardly anyone uses. In most Office 365 tenants, the default domain has been set to whatever your company usually uses for public websites and the like. However, there might be circumstances where a user needs to be assigned to a different domain name. Enter the username, and use the drop-down menu to select the correct domain name if the default isn't the right one.
It's important to select a location if it hasn't prepopulated for you. You won't be able to add licensing until the location is set.
Whether you fill out the contact information or not is probably a matter of your company's policy. It won't affect a user's capabilities if you don't do it, but if you do, that information will be carried into Exchange and SharePoint, so it won't need to be reentered in the global address list or user profiles:
The options for setting the password include either autogenerating it and emailing it to the email you choose upon completion of the new user task, or creating it manually by yourself. For either option, you can force the user to change it when they sign-in, or allow them to continue to use it.
Most users will be assigned User (no administrator access), and most IT staff who need administrative access will probably be assigned Global administrator, but in a large organization, you may well want to use the Customized administrator setting to fine-tune which rights you grant.
Finally, you will need to set the licenses. You'll see a series of toggle switches that represent all of the licenses your company has available:
The last toggle is Create user without product license. While Microsoft labels this as Not recommended, it might be a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you're not the one with the authority to purchase extra licenses; get the user created without a license, and they'll be able to get into the Office 365 portal and set their new password while you're waiting for the purchasing people to acquire the license. (This is also what you're likely to do if you need to create a service account.)
You must set one of the toggle switches, or it won't allow you to create the user. So, if there are no available licenses, use the one that creates the user without a license.
After you're done, you'll get a window telling you the user's password (if it was autogenerated) and offering to email that password to the default address (usually yours, if you're the primary Office 365 administrator.)
Using the user panel
You can reset passwords, set licenses and roles, disable or enable Office 365 sign-in, add new aliases and change which email address is primary, and perform many other functions, via the user panel.
To access the user panel, simply click on an active user, and it'll open to the right.
A lot of these functions are very similar to the equivalent that you'd perform for new users. For example, resetting a password is just like setting it for the first time for a new user:
Assigning a license is just like assigning a license to a new user. But there are some functions that can be performed via the user panel that don't have an equivalent in the Add a user task:
Group memberships aren't something that you can assign in
Add a user
, because the mailbox needs to be provisioned before groups can be assigned. By clicking
Edit
under
Group memberships
in the user panel, you can add the user to a group, see the groups they're already in, and delete them from groups they are members of.
You can also change the sign-in settings. If you have an employee that's leaving the company at the end of the day, you can cut off their ability to sign in to Office 365 products without either deleting them or changing their password by simply setting their
Sign-in status
to
Sign-in b
locked
. (There will be more on this topic in
Chapter 3
,
Administering Azure Active Directory
.) This is especially useful if they're synchronized with Active Directory and it's handled by a different department, so you don't have the rights to change their password or delete them. You should note, though, that because this disables sign-in, it won't affect a user who is already signed in until that sign in expires. So it's not the best tool to use for the person who's being frog-marched out the door by security right now and might still be signed in on their personal tablet.
You can view the devices that a user has installed Office onto, and deactivate their installation. (Possibly a good idea to do to the home laptop of that employee in the previous example! However, you can only perform it on PC and macOS devices, not mobile ones, so you still can't get that tablet.) If an employee had a device stolen or destroyed, and they're at their five-device limit for Office installations, you can deactivate the lost device here, so that they can install it on their replacement device.
If you click the expanding carat for
Mail Settings
, you can directly work with mailbox permissions, email forwarding, litigation hold, auto replies, what apps the user is allowed to use to access email with, and whether they're in the global address list, without having to go into Exchange. (We'll go into what these options mean in more detail in
Chapter 3
,
Administering Azure Active Directory
and
Chapter 4
,
Administering Exchange Online – Essentials
.) There's also a direct link to Exchange, which will take you straight into this user's Exchange properties.
The expanding carat for
OneDrive Settings
gives you the option to get access to the user's OneDrive, which is very helpful if they're out of the office or have left the company, and there's important business information that they are storing in there. You can also turn external sharing to the user's OneDrive (meaning that the user can share with users outside of your company) on or off.
You can kick off a one-time sign-out event that kicks the user out of every instance of Office 365 they're signed into. This is useful if you're changing their username, or in the case of that employee being frog-marched out the door in the example. Oddly, though this has nothing to do with OneDrive; it's stored under the
OneDrive Settings
carat.
The direct links at the bottom let you edit the user's Skype for Business properties, or go directly to their multi-factor authentication settings.
Views
Views are covered in detail in Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory, so we won't delve too deeply here.
There's a default view that shows all users. If you have a small company, that might be fine. As soon as you have a large number of users (or accounts, such as service accounts that were assigned email addresses, external contacts who were invited as guest users, former employees, special-purpose administrator accounts, and so on), the list can get unwieldy. You may want to use one of the other default views, or create one of your own. See Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory for more information on how to do this.
Import multiple users
Finally, the last function of the Active users page that we'll discuss is the Import multiple users function. If you have a moderately large organization and you are not planning to synchronize with AD, you might want to import a large number of users at the same time:
You get to this feature by clicking the More drop-down menu at the top of Active users. Download a CSV file to use as a template (you can choose one with just the headers, or one with sample user data, to help you understand how to format your users), enter all of your users into it, upload with the Browse button, and then click Verify to make sure your formatting is correct. Click Next and follow the prompts. You'll be able to set a sign-in status and choose product licenses on the next page, and then send the results to yourself or someone else. (Note that the passwords handled this way will be in plain text, so you may want to require your users to change their passwords as soon as possible.)
Other functions of the Active users page are fairly self-explanatory, such as Delete a user or Export. Let's move on.
Contacts
Contacts are email addresses from outside of your organization that are recorded in Exchange so that users can find them in the global address list:
It's easier to enter a contact than it is to enter a user—there are a lot fewer fields to fill out.
Display name and Email are the only required fields, although if you are going to use contacts heavily and need to be able to search for them with multiple criteria, you might want to fill in the other fields.
By default, contacts appear in the global address list, although you can exclude them with the Hide from my organization address list toggle. Contacts, as a concept, come from Microsoft Exchange, and are a means to include people from outside the company in distribution lists. They can also be included in Office 365 Groups, as of May 2017.
Guest users
Guest users, as a concept, are more closely related to SharePoint and OneDrive. A guest user has been granted access, via sharing, to a resource on SharePoint or OneDrive. They're only relevant if your organization allows external sharing.
A guest user will automatically be created if you create a sharing link for a specific email address within SharePoint or OneDrive. You can't create them here, but you can view and delete them.
Note that guest users don't have a presence in the global address list, and the same email address can't be both a contact and a guest user. If you have a need to give people who are frequently contacted by your users access to SharePoint and OneDrive while also having them as a global contact, and also having them on a list that automatically sends them and other people email, it might make more sense to use an Office 365 Group rather than a traditional distribution list, because members of those Groups can be both guest users and mail contacts at the same time.
Deleted users
Up to 30 days after you delete a user, they can be restored:
Use the Deleted users screen to see who has been deleted, export them if you need a CSV report, and restore them.
More vital information about the user recycle bin will be covered in Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory.
Groups
While there's more functionality for working with groups in the Exchange Administration Center, many of the most common functions have been made available directly in the Office 365 administration portal, under Groups.
The two headings you'll find here are Groups (yes, really, it's the same word) and Shared mailboxes.
Groups
There are four types of groups within Office 365: distribution lists, security groups, mail-enabled security groups, and Office 365 lists. There are also shared mailboxes, but they have their own heading. We'll discuss the differences in Chapter 4, Administering Exchange Online – Essentials:
When you click on any group, a panel will open (usually to the right) displaying its properties, and you can edit many of the properties right there.
Distribution lists and mail-enabled security groups primarily live in Exchange, so their panels offer direct links to Exchange, to do further editing there, if desired.
Office 365 Groups and regular security groups are accessible via the Exchange administration site, but the Office 365 administration portal is equally competent at handling them, so Microsoft hasn't bothered including those links on their panels.
Within Office 365, you can edit:
The name, description, ownership, and membership of a distribution list, and whether external senders are allowed.
The name, description, ownership, and membership of a security group.
The name, description, ownership, and membership of a mail-enabled security group, and whether external senders are allowed.
The name, description, ownership, and membership of an Office 365 group, whether external senders are allowed, and whether senders should be automatically subscribed. It'll display your privacy settings—that is, is the group public or private—but you can't edit them after creating a group.
For a new group, there's a lot less functionality for creation than there is for editing, and particularly for the traditional types of groups; distribution, security, and mail-enabled security groups can't have owners or members defined during creation, and Office 365 Groups can only define the owner at creation, if you're using the administration portal.
Shared mailboxes
You can edit a lot of the properties of a shared mailbox by using the shared mailbox panel when you click on one of the shared mailboxes on this page:
