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.
Not all issues you run into are going to be reported already in the service help dashboard. In fact, some problems you encounter might be specific to your configuration, or to your tenant directly, or you might even be one of the first people to encounter a much larger issue. In this case your best bet is to open a ticket with Microsoft support and work through the issues with them.
To open a new service request, click on Support and then New service request. On the service request pop-up you'll see the Office 365 assistant, which is a bot that Microsoft has recently introduced into the support experience. Simply type in a description of the problem you've encountered, and take a look at the options provided to see if any of these support articles will help you find the solution. We'll type in Autodiscover issues, and let's see what they come back with. So you can look through the different articles that are provided here.
They're gonna be links to TechNet articles and to support documents that Microsoft has provided. It's worth trying some of these to see if they help your situation, or just searching the web for potential solutions from TechNet, the Microsoft tech community, or even various support blogs. Always be careful when attempting fixes suggested by third party bloggers. The information is often helpful, but might not be applicable to your case due to your specific setup. Always exercise caution when attempting fixes that are not being recommended directly by Microsoft.
When in doubt, work with Microsoft Support to troubleshoot and resolve your issues rather than attempting something that might potentially cause other issues. If you're confident that you'll need to continue opening a ticket, just click on the No option, and then choose the option for a callback or an email, and then upload any relevant screenshots into the ticket. After this, you can always view the current status of your support request by clicking on View service requests. From this dashboard you can view the history on closed tickets or action open tickets by requesting a callback from Microsoft support. Don't forget you can also view the status of your ticket by using the Microsoft 365 admin app on your phone, and stay in touch with Microsoft Support even when you're not at your desk.
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.