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.
Another dashboard available to the reporting section of the Office 365 admin portal is the security and compliance reports.
Note that as of February 2019, the lengthy security and compliance reporting has been replaced by a message prompting you to go to the reports dashboard in the security and compliance center. There are also exchange reports available under "auditing and exchange", but I'm expecting at some point that Microsoft is going to move all of these reports into the security and compliance center, so you can see them all in one spot. What you've configured in your environment will impact the reporting shown in the S and C.
For instance, since I have no DLP labels configured, there is no usage data available for DLP. Further down, I can see the use of exchange transport rules, the number of malware instances attempted in email, as well as spoofing and spam numbers. There are other standard reports available to you, such as the amount of email sent and received over the last 30 days, and who your top senders and recipients are. Clicking on any of these report cards will allow you to delve deeper into the metrics and pull some potentially useful information from the data that has been collected. Of course, these reports are only as useful as how you use the data. Most of this might only be good to know for you currently, but it might be incredibly useful as forensic data to maintain security and raise awareness of user trends that might become problematic over time. Finally, clicking through some of these reports allows you to perform some additional functions, such as scheduling reports that get sent through email to the email address you specify. Click on the "create schedule" icon, and then choose your start date, and then choose the option to customize your schedule.
From here, you can give your schedule a name, choose whether it needs to be weekly or monthly, and then when the start date and the expire date is, and then click "next". Under the filters, you can leave it as "default" to gather data from all users in your environment, or scope it down to specific users. Click "next" and choose your recipients, who you want to send the email to, then click "save" and then "finish". Once you've created a report or a scheduled report, it's available under "manage schedules" on the left hand side. You can go through different scheduled reports and delete them out of the schedule, or just simply keep an eye on them. Depending on the type of report that it is, you can also just click on the report card itself, and choose "request a report". Again, similar to a scheduled report, this picks a certain snapshot of time, click "next", click "filters", or leave it at the default, click "next", specify who it goes to, and then save. This report now will show up under "reports for download", and you can re-download it if you need to, or simply check your email for the report that you just generated.
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.