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.
In the M365 admin center, you can customize your dashboard to show you information at a glance that is relevant to you. A good example of this would be to add the message center, as well as service health, and potentially even something like the active users report.
Messages in the message center are broken down into three basic categories, Plan For Change, Stay Informed, and Prevent or Fix Issues. Right away, you can see that this gives you a number of different options. Some of these messages will be things you need to action in your tenant, and others are just good to know. Not everything requires you to do something, but it might be as simple as just letting you know about feature or service changes. Some of these upcoming features that are listed in the Stay Informed category might be a change that you need to communicate to your users or might just be something for you to know.
Plan For Change often reflects end user impact. Consider adding these changes to a scheduled communication to your users or maybe just to let your admin teams know so they can provide additional information when users are opening tickets. Let's take a look at the different categories of messages and get an idea of what we're looking at here. You can filter your view down to, let's say, Plan for change and filter this list down to see things that are actually gonna be changing in your environment. You can take a look through them. See which ones are critical to you, which ones are important, which ones are not really relevant to you, and at least make sure you understand what is gonna be coming down the line.
Under Stay informed, again, this is more of a good to know feature. This is gonna let you know of things that are happening that you just wanna know about them. You might wanna communicate them with your users, but you don't necessarily need to do anything about them. And then Prevent or fix issues. Of course, there's gonna be things that could be of real importance to you and are actually having problems that are gonna require you to take some steps to fix. It's a really good idea to go through these messages specifically and make sure that you know what they are and whether or not they affect you, what the impact is, and what you need to do to potentially mitigate that risk or impact to your business.
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.