Microsoft 365 represents a combination of Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility offerings – providing the most complete set of SaaS technologies that Microsoft has to offer. With Microsoft 365, organizations can deploy a complete solution encompassing both devices and applications, along with applying security and compliance policies to protect the entire suite.
This course will help you as you plan your deployment of Microsoft 365, along with configuring and managing your tenant once it’s deployed. It also covers setting up and managing a Microsoft 365 subscription for an enterprise – including managing identities, security, compliance and the supporting technologies in the Microsoft 365 stack.
This course focuses mainly on setting up and managing a Microsoft 365 tenant – including the process for setting up a trial tenant, adding your own domains, and converting your tenant beyond the trial to a fully functional production environment. Now, these steps can seem to be very easy – just click a few options, answer a few questions, and you’re done. In fact, it is that easy! However, if you’re not aware of the big picture and asking some important questions along the way, you can end up painting yourself into a corner and causing problems down the road. At best, you might need to redo some things, at worst, you leave yourself with problems on your hands that might be difficult to sort out later.
After you’re set up, we’ll move on to talking about some of the things you need to consider in your day to day monitoring and management of your Microsoft 365 Tenant and the services that make it up. We’re also going to run through a few demos – showing you some of the practical steps involved, along with some tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way.
Learning Objectives
- Set up a new Microsoft 365 tenant and subscription
- Add domains to the tenant and configure them for the various service offerings
- Perform the day to day management of your users, including managing user accounts and license assignment
- Know how to monitor the various services in your M365 tenant and have a plan in place to respond to service alerts and manage service requests
Intended Audience
This course is intended for people who:
- Want to become a Microsoft 365 administrator
- Are preparing to take the Microsoft’s MS-100 exam
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course, you should have a general understanding of networking & server administration as well as IT fundamentals such as DNS, Active Directory and PowerShell.
This brings us to the end of the first of two courses in the Designing and Implementing Microsoft 365 Services series called Set Up and Manage a Microsoft 365 Tenant.
After going through this course, you should now be familiar with the process behind setting up a Microsoft 365 tenant and the various subscription options, as well as knowing how to apply licenses and monitor your existing license allocations. We also covered domain management, talked about your default on microsoft.com domain, and how to add your own domains and choose a new default domain name.
You should now be comfortable with adding and editing the DNS entries required to verify your domains and to configure the various Microsoft 365 services. We also talked about accepted domains in Exchange Online and a few things to consider when adding your domains to Exchange Online, especially in a hybrid or a pilot environment.
We spent some time talking about subscription and tenant management and investigated the various features and options available for monitoring your service health, managing your user activities, monitoring and alerting on security and compliance, as well as service and user metrics. A couple of key points to remember is that when you are creating your new tenant, there are two permanent decisions you need to make right off the bat. The first is your tenant location, which is set when you're signing up for the service. And the second is that your default or your onmicrosoft.com domain. Both options are set during sign-up and cannot be changed afterwards, so make sure you plan these out before you start the sign-up process.
Around domain management, it's important to remember that not all of the required DNS records in the Office 365 portal are needed at every stage in your journey to the cloud. If you're configuring a hybrid exchange environment, for instance, you're going to want to keep your MX and Autodiscover records pointing to your existing infrastructure and only move them over when you're ready to make that transition. Just because the domain wizard is expecting those values to exist, doesn't mean it's the right time to migrate them.
For monitoring and management, the Office 365 Admin app is the administrator's secret weapon, allowing you to keep an eye on your tenant, receive push notifications of critical alerts, and perform some basic user management tasks without needing to be sitting at your computer. This app is a great tool that every administrator should have installed. A great next step from here would be to set up your own demo subscription and try out these features for yourself and give you a playground where you can try out different configuration options in a safe, non-production environment. You can also try out the Microsoft 365 Power BI Adoption pack, as well as the OMS Office 365 management solution to give you a well-rounded look at the reporting and alerting features, as well as the regular management and user features from Microsoft 365.
This trial tenant can be decommissioned at the end of the 30-day trial, but you also might be able to make a business case around keeping it for a bit longer and potentially pay for a few licenses for a couple of months to continue learning and getting comfortable with the Microsoft 365 services. Some additional resources that are available to you to dive deeper into some of these concepts are number one, the Microsoft Tech Academy.
The Microsoft Tech Academy has a number of free training resources and videos, including links to a wide number of videos from Ignite. It's a great resource that's freely available to you. Number two is the Microsoft Tech Community. The Microsoft Technical Community hosts a number of Microsoft 365 blogs that are great sources of ongoing communication and training. If you're not a member of the Microsoft Tech Community, go ahead and join up and begin both reading and contributing to the conversations there. Please join us for the second part of this course called Planning for Implementation and Migration, where we'll cover the planning process for a successful Microsoft 365 deployment and migrating your user data into Microsoft 365. Thanks for watching.
Jeremy Dahl is a Senior Technology Consultant who has spent the last 8 years focusing on Microsoft 365 technologies and has been an Office 365 MVP for the last 6 years. Jeremy is a self-proclaimed cloud addict who architects technology solutions that combine cloud technologies with on-premises solutions, allowing organizations to make the most of their existing infrastructure while still taking full advantage of the agility and scalability of what the cloud has to offer.
Jeremy can be found blogging about Microsoft 365 technologies on his website, masterandcmdr.com, and evangelizing the Microsoft cloud on Twitter.