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.
When creating a new tenant, there's a couple of things you need to keep in mind. First off, the user account you create when you're signing up becomes the first global admin in your tenant. From there, you'll want to make sure you have at least one more administrator account set up in case you lose access to this one.
Think carefully about whom you want to be a global admin in your tenant. This is the admin role with the highest privileges in Office 365. And anyone to whom you assign the global admin role will be able to make any changes they want. A global admin in Microsoft 365 can add and remove subscriptions, create and delete users, as well as make configuration changes within the tenant. As such, this role should be considered a protected role and you should ensure that a global admin account is used only when needed. Don't just assign your daily use account global admin access. We're still in the early stages, but it's a good time to start thinking about the different admin roles you want to assign your users as you're creating them.
At this point in time, you might just want to add a few of your IT users to start looking around and playing with different Office 365 features. You might want to configure role-based access control or RBAC in your tenant so that your administrators can begin to see what options are available to them with different roles. It might be easier for you at this point to make everyone a global admin, and that's fine. Just make sure that by the time you start to move production data and users into Office 365, you've already begun thinking about your security and admin model and start implementing it at the same time.
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.