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.
The best way to get started with Microsoft 365 is to set up a trial tenant, so that you have a chance to explore all the options and features available to you. In this section, we're gonna walk through the process of setting up a tenant, so that you can see first hand what that looks like.
When we're talking about a tenant, we're referring to your own unique environment within the Microsoft 365 eco-system. Starting with office 365, you have a multi tenant hosted subscription, which contains a separate and unique Exchange, Share point, One Drive, Yammer, Teams and Skype environment. These components together make up a tenant in Office 365, and what you have enabled in your tenant is based the type of subscription you configure. Adding the M365 pieces to this picture means that your tenant also gets enabled with Enterprise Mobility and Security features called EM+S, as well as Windows 10 Enterprise licensing. You can start setting up your tenant by going to the Microsoft 365 product page and reviewing the subscription plans available there. You can look over the options for business, enterprise and education. If you need to see more scenarios, such as small business, government, non-profit, first line workers and Office 365 for home, head over to the Office 365 product page instead.
Remember that you can create your tenant initially with all of the Microsoft 365 features enabled, or you can start out as an Office 365 subscription and then later on, the M365 pieces that you need later. In this case, we're going to start with an M365 business subscription. This gives us enough that we need to get started with the demo or pilot, and then we can go back and add the different license options we require when we're ready to move to production. Don't forget that you can mix and match your licenses based on your requirements, so you can set up some users with M365 licenses and some with Office 365 licenses, only if you need that granularity. Need to have a few users set up with an E3 or an E5 license, but still enable some front line workers who have very basic technology needs? No problem at all. You can configure your license and subscription options to fit your needs exactly. Also, you can pay month to month for your user licenses. Which allows you to add and remove licenses or subscriptions very quickly, minimizing the amount of money you're spending month by month.
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.