Category: Microsoft 365

Its Day 80 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey, and todays post is taking a quick look at how to administer your Microsoft 365 tenancy.

Over the previous posts, we’ve looked at how to migrate our users from our on-premises environment into Microsoft 365, and along the way we’ve chosen identity models and a suitable licensing model for our organisation.

So thats it, the hard work is done! Time for a coffee, put the feet up and read the news. Maybe do the crossword, or even todays Wordle…..

Not so fast. You now have your users in Microsoft 365, you need to manage and administer your environment. Don’t forget that Microsoft 365 is a SaaS service, so you still need to manage it using Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

Admin Center overview

The admin center can be used to manage user accounts and mailboxes, configure the Office 365 cloud environment, monitor statistics, and so on.

When you log on to the Admin Center, there are 2 main panels down the left hand side:

• Tenant and User Management panel – this is where you will manage the following:
  • Users – the most common task for administrators is managing user accounts. You can perform tasks such as manage users (add, edit, delete, export users), reset passwords, assign or remove user licenses.
  • Groups – manage Office 365 groups, security groups, distribution lists and shared mailboxes in your organization. You will also see groups that have been synchronized from our on-premises environment.
  • Roles – when you sign up for a Microsoft 365 trial, the user who you sign up up with becomes a Global Admin and has full access over all aspects of the tenant. Roles allows you to assign different admin roles for other users (administrators). This is useful if you want to delegate some authority to other administrators who should be focused on Exchange management, license management or SharePoint management, without giving those users the full Global Admin role.
  • Resources – allows you to create and manage resources, such as SharePoint sites and conference rooms for conference purposes.
  • Billing – view your subscription status, purchase additional Microsoft cloud services, check billing and payments, and configure payment methods.
  • Support – allows you to create support requests to Microsoft if needed and view recent service requests and their status.
  • Settings – allows you to manage global settings including authentication settings, email settings, calendar, external sharing, password policy, Azure Active Directory integration.
  • Setup – details for your subscription, assign or manage software licenses, manage domains and data migration.
  • Reports – gives detailed reports showing how users inside your company use Microsoft 365 applications. You can monitor which applications are favorite among users and compare dynamics for the selected period (7, 30, 90 or 180 days).
  • Health – used to check the health of your Office 365 services.
• Admin Centers panel – this is where you will access the individual Admin centers for each of the Microsoft 365 services in your tenancy, including:
  • Security – Get visibility into your security state, investigate and protect against threats, get recommendations on how to increase your security, and more.
  • Compliance – Manage your compliance needs using integrated solutions for data governance, encryption, access control, eDiscovery, and more.
  • Azure Active Directory – Allows you to configure Azure AD for Office 365 and synchronization with Windows Server Active Directory; to manage users, groups and policies; and to set access parameters for third-party applications that interact with Office 365 via Microsoft APIs.
  • Exchange – manage Office 365 user accounts and mailboxes. Configure group mailboxes, anti-spam protection, mail flow rules, and so on.
  • SharePoint – configure the Microsoft cloud environment so that users in the organization can collaborate.
  • Teams – allows you to schedule meetings for teams by using Skype for business, manage teams, set policies, view reports, and so on.
  • All admin centers – Opens a page with a full list of Office 365 admin centers, including admin centers for OneDrive, Yammer Enterprise, Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Skype for business, and other services.

So what happens next?

The answer to that is really up to your organisation and how you want to benefit from the range of services available in Microsoft 365. As I’ve stated previously, the main reason why companies migrate their workloads is to remove the overhead of managing and maintaining an on-premises Exchange environment, and the underlying Operating Systems, Storage, Networking, Security and Patch Management that goes along with it.

Of course, how you develop and use these services this depends on what licensing level you have chosen (and if you missed that, take a look back at Day 78), but effectively the main options that organisations will end up using are:

• Teams – this allows instant messaging, user-to-user voice calling, team collaboration and file repostories (backed by SharePoint), and an optional full VOIP service where you can migrate your PABX to Teams Voice.
• SharePoint – we looked at this on Day 72 where we compared migrating file data to SharePoint or Azure Files.
• Azure Active Directory – this allows conditional acces and multi-factor authentication to be built into your tenant identify, as we looked at on Day 56.

Conclusion

And thats a quick look at the different options available in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

There is lots of great information out there on Microsoft 365 that goes into far more detail that I have, and a great startng point is Microsoft Docs here.

If you want to follow someone in the community to get a full overview of Microsoft/Office365 and all of the services and updates, there is no one better than Tony Redmond, who you can follow on Twitter here or you can read his updates on Petri.com here. He’s also the principal author of Office 365 for IT Pros books and blog.

Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!

Its Day 78 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey, and as promised todays post is all about the wide range of different licensing options available in Microsoft 365.

The migration planning is going well, and at this point we’ve decided the following:

• Migration has been signed off, so tenancy created!
• We know how we’re going to authenticate users!
• We know how we’re going to synchronize our users identities!
• We know what migration strategy we’re going to use!
• Now all we need to decide on is what applications and services our users need once they migrate. So ……

We need to decide what licenses we need …..

Ugh.

Anyone who has dealt with Microsoft licensing knows that its a potential minefield due to the depth of options available. I mean, does anyone really understand how many OS and SQL Core License Packs you need to run your on-premise SCVMM Server with underlying SQL Server Enterprise Edition installed on a Windows Server DataCenter OS thats running on a VM in a 4-Node AzureStack HCI Cluster?

Nope, neither do I.

While an initial look at the Microsoft 365 plans would suggest that this is no different, its important to understand how the plans are structured. Lets start with the basics and what these plans are called. You can either have a Microsoft 365 Business Plan or an Office 365 Enterprise Plan, so lets explore the options in both and why you would choose one over the other.

Microsoft 365 Business Plans

Microsoft 365 Business Plans are recomended for companies with less that 300 users, and provide a cost effective way to migrate your users.

All Microsoft 365 Business Plans comes with the following features included:

• 50GB Mailbox per user.
• 50GB Archive Mailbox per user.
• Office Online (web versions of Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote).
• Maximum of 1TB OneDrive personal storage for each user (this can be reduced depending on your requirements).
• 1 TB SharePoint Storage per tenancy, plus 10GB for each additional user (this can be increased with Storage Add-Ons if required).
• Microsoft Teams.
• Yammer.
• Active Directory SSO for synchronized users.
• Content Search and Basic Auditing.

In effect, the above list is what you get with the Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan, which is the lowest offering at $5.00 per month. As you can see, lots of great features, but the one thing thats missing is Desktop versions of the Office Apps.

For that, we need to go up to the next level of plan which is Microsoft 365 Business Standard, which at $12.50 per month is the most worthwhile plan to go for in your initial migration stage. As well as what’s listed above, this gives you the following add-ons:

• Desktop versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
• Desktop versions of Access and Publisher.
• Install apps on up to 5 devices across all platforms.

And thats all you get as an extra. Just apps. But bear in mind, there is also a separate Microsoft 365 Apps for Business plan which is just Desktop versions of the apps and comes in a $8.25 per month.

Lets go up to the top level which is Microsoft 365 Business Premium, which comes in at $22.00 per month. Pricey, but on top of all of the above, you also get the following:

• Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
• Mobile Application Management.
• Intune.
• Windows Autopilot.
• Shared Computer Activation (Use Office apps on Remote Desktop Services or Citrix).
• Defender for Endpoint.
• Defender for Office 365.
• Windows Defender.
• Azure Active Directory Premium P1.
• Conditional Access.
• Azure Information Protection.
• Sensitivity Labels.
• Office365 Data Loss Prevention.
• Office Message Encryption.
• Litigation Hold.

As you can see from from this list, Business Premium goes deep into the realm of data security, compliance and governance.

You can find more details on Microsoft 365 Business Plans here.

Office 365 Enterprise Plans

Office 365 Enterprise plans are designed for companies with more than 300 users who need more advanced features such as eDiscovery.

The plans structures are effectively the same as above with some subtle differences. Lets run through these quickly, and start with Office 365 E1 which comes in at $10.00 per month and gives you the following:

• 50GB Mailbox per user.
• 50GB Archive Mailbox per user.
• Office Online (web versions of Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote).
• Maximum of 1TB OneDrive personal storage for each user (this can be reduced depending on your requirements).
• 1 TB SharePoint Storage per tenancy, plus 10GB for each additional user (this can be increased with Storage Add-Ons if required).
• Microsoft Teams.
• Yammer.
• Active Directory SSO for synchronized users.
• Content Search and Basic Auditing.

So in effect, the same as Microsoft 365 Business Basic above. When we move up to Office 365 E3 for $23.00 per month, we get the following add-ons:

• 100GB mailbox per user.
• Unlimited archive mailbox per user.
• Desktop versions of apps.
• 5TB of OneDrive Storage per user.
• Shared Computer Activation (Use Office apps on Remote Desktop Services or Citrix).
• Azure Information Protection for Office 365.
• Office365 Data Loss Prevention.
• Office Message Encryption.
• eDiscovery.
• Litigation Hold.

The top level plan is Office 365 E5 which is $38.00 per month. There are only a few add-ons provided here, but as you can see they are big ones:

• PowerBI Pro for Data Analyics.
• Phone System and Audio Conferencing.
• Defender for Office365 Plan 2.
• Advanced eDiscovery and Audit.

You cna find out more about Office 365 Enterprise Plans here.

Which one to choose?

As you can see, plenty of choice there. Just to clarify, you can use Office 365 Enterprise licenses in organisations with under 300 users as well if you feel this is a better option for your business.

For smaller business, the recommendation is to stick with the Microsoft 365 Business plans as they provide more of an “all-in-one” solution given the amount of features that are bundled into the licenses. Larger companies and those with specific regulatory requirements will make more use of the Group Policy, DLP, Compliance and Information Protection offerings available in the Office 365 Enterprise plans.

The key here is to use your 30-day trial wisely and roadtest each of the plans available to see which one is the best fit for your business.

The license plans I’ve described above cover the majority of companies, however its good to be aware that there is a also a set of Microsoft 365 plans specifically designed for Frontline workers. You can find more details on those here.

Conclusion

And thats a look at the different licensing plans available in Microsoft 365 and Office 365! Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!

Its Day 77 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey, and as promised todays post is taking a closer look at the different migration options available to you for moving your on-premise Email workloads to Microsoft 365.

In the last post, we saw the first of those options where we discovered how Exchange Hybrid configuration works. However, this also ties you into keeping an Exchange Server active in your on-premise environment, which for the majority of businesses is costly and negates one of the main drivers of migration: removing the management and cost overhead of maintaining an on-premise email environment.

Migration Options

You can migrate all email, calendar items, tasks and contacts from user mailboxes to Office 365 from an existing on-premises Exchange Server environment.

The available methods are cutover, staged, and Exchange Hybrid migrations. These migration methods copy over all mail data, including contacts, calendar items, and tasks.

You can also use (IMAP) migration from Exchange servers, and if your Exchange server is older than Exchange 2003, or if your on-premise email system is a non-Exchange system. However, you need to be aware that an IMAP migration will copy over only email data.

We’ve already see how Exchange Hybrid works, lets take a look at the other 2 options.

Cutover Migration

A cutover migration moves all of your mailboxes at one time in a single batch. This sort of Office 365 migration process can be used if the email infrastructure runs on Exchange versions from 2003 to 2013.

• You can move your entire email organization to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 over a few days and manage user accounts in Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
• A maximum of 2,000 mailboxes can be migrated to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 using a cutover Exchange migration. However, it is recommended that you only migrate 150 mailboxes at a time.
• The primary domain name used for your on-premises Exchange organization must be an accepted domain owned by you in your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization.
• After the migration is complete, each user who has an on-premises Exchange mailbox also will be a new user in Microsoft 365 or Office 365. However, you must still assign licenses to users whose mailboxes are migrated.

After your on-premises and Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organizations are set up for a cutover migration, post-setup tasks could impact your users.

• Administrators or users must configure desktop computers to ensure these are set up for use with Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
• Potential delay in email routing until the MX record is changed from on-premise to Microsoft 365.

The steps needed to run a cutover migration are shown in the image below:

1. The administrator communicates upcoming changes to users and verifies domain ownership with the domain registrar.
2. The administrator prepares the servers for a cutover migration and creates empty mail-enabled security groups in Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
3. The administrator connects Microsoft 365 or Office 365 to the on-premises email system (this is called creating a migration endpoint).
4. The administrator migrates the mailboxes and then verifies the migration.
5. Grant Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licenses to your users.
6. The administrator configures the domain to begin routing email directly to Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
7. The administrator verifies that routing has changed, and then deletes the cutover migration batch.
8. The administrator completes post-migration tasks in Microsoft 365 or Office 365 (assigns licenses to users and creates an Autodiscover Domain Name System (DNS) record), and optionally decommissions the on-premises Exchange servers.
9. The administrator sends a welcome letter to users to tell them about Microsoft 365 or Office 365 and to describe how to sign in to their new mailboxes.

Further detail on how Cutover Migration works can be found here.

Staged Migration

For Exchange server versions running either 2003 or 2007, the only supported migration method to Microsoft O365 is Staged Migration. With this migration type, you can move your entire email infrastructure in batches. This method is beneficial for legacy Exchange servers if you have more than 2000 seats; however, for a successful migration, some critical factors need to be taken into consideration:

• You must synchronize accounts between your on-premises Active Directory domain and Microsoft 365 or Office 365 by using Azure Active Directory sync for a staged migration to work.
• The primary domain name used for your on-premises Exchange organization must be a domain verified to your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization.
• You can migrate only user mailboxes and resource mailboxes. Other recipient types, such as distribution groups, contacts, and mail-enabled users are migrated to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 through the process of directory synchronization.
• Out of Office messages aren’t migrated with user mailboxes. The user needs to recreate the Out of Office message after the mailbox is migrated.
• If you limited the connections to your source email system, it’s a good idea to increase them to improve migration performance.

The steps needed to run a staged migration are shown in the image below:

1. The administrator synchronizes the list of users between their on-premises environment and Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
2. The administrator creates a comma-separated value (CSV) file that contains a row for each user whose on-premises mailbox will be migrated in the migration batch.
3. The administrator creates and runs a staged migration batch by using the migration dashboard in the Exchange admin center.After the administrator starts the migration batch, Exchange Online does the following:
   • Verifies that directory synchronization is enabled.
   • Checks that a mail-enabled user exists in the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization for each user listed in the CSV file. Mail-enabled users are created in Microsoft 365 or Office 365 as a result of the directory synchronization process.
   • Converts the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 mail-enabled user to an Exchange Online mailbox for each user in the migration batch.
   • Begins initial synchronization. Exchange Online processes up to N migration requests at one time. N represents the maximum number of concurrent migrations that the administrator specified when creating the migration endpoint used for the migration batch. By default, initial synchronization is performed on 20 mailboxes at a time until all mailboxes in the migration batch are migrated.
   • Configures mail forwarding. The TargetAddress property on the on-premises mailbox is configured with the email address of the Exchange Online mailbox. This process means that mail sent to the on-premises mailbox is forwarded to the corresponding Exchange Online mailbox.
4. After it creates the Exchange Online mailbox and configures mail forwarding for each user in the CSV file, Exchange Online sends a status email message to the administrator. This status message lists the number of mailboxes that were successfully migrated and how many couldn’t be migrated. The message also includes links to migration statistics and error reports that contain more detailed information. At this point, users can start using their Exchange Online mailboxes.
5. As part of initial synchronization, Exchange Online then migrates all email messages, contacts, and calendar items from the on-premises mailboxes to Exchange Online mailboxes. Exchange Online sends a final migration report when the data migration is complete.
6. After a migration batch is complete and the administrator verifies that all mailboxes in the batch are successfully migrated, the administrator can convert the on-premises mailboxes to mail-enabled users.
7. If a user opens their mailbox with Outlook, the Autodiscover service tries to connect to the on-premises mailbox. After you convert on-premises mailboxes to mail-enabled users, the Autodiscover service uses the mail-enabled user to connect Outlook to the Exchange Online mailbox after the user creates a new Outlook profile.
8. The administrator creates additional migration batches, submitting a CSV file for each one.
9. The administrator runs additional migration batches.
10. The administrator resolves any issues. After all on-premises mailboxes in a batch are successfully migrated, the administrator deletes the migration batch.
11. Users can use their Exchange Online mailboxes.
12. The administrator, to complete the transition to Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 or Office 365, performs post-configuration tasks such as:
    • Assign licenses to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 users.
    • Configure the MX record to point to your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization so that email is delivered directly to Exchange Online mailboxes.
    • Create an Autodiscover Domain Name System (DNS) record for your Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organization.

Further detail on how Cutover Migration works can be found here.

Conclusion

So thats a look at the different migration options available to migrate your on-premise Exchange environment to Microsoft 365 tenant.

In the next post, we’ll look at the myriad of different licensing options available. Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!