Office 365 Administration Playbook

Course Overview
Hello everyone, my name is Paul Cunningham, and welcome to my course, the Office 365 Administration Playbook. I'm a Microsoft MVP for Office servers and services, which includes products and services such as Office 365, Exchange Online, and Exchange Server on-premises. I've been an IT professional for nearly 20 years, designing and deploying server and application infrastructure, supporting large enterprises, and helping customers migrate and run their IT in the cloud with Office 365. Moving to Office 365 means a whole new set of tools and processes are required for performing day-to-day administration tasks for your organization. Even an experienced IT professional needs to learn the new way to perform the same tasks in Office 365 as they're used to performing on-premises. This course covers, at an intermediate level, how to administer Office 365 using the web-based administration portals that are provided with the service. Some of the topics that we'll cover include provisioning a brand-new Office 365 tenant, user account administration, license management, groups and resources, and managing OneDrive for Business. By the end of this course, you'll be able to confidently perform common Office 365 administration tasks, and have an understanding of how and where to apply your new skills to other scenarios you encounter on the job. Before beginning this course, you should be familiar with the basics of Office 365 and the services and features that are included with it. However, if this is your first time using Office 365, you'll still be able to follow along and learn as we go. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learning Office 365 administration here at Pluralsight.

Office 365 Tenant Provisioning
Let's get started with Office 365 Tenant Provisioning. You might not need to do this task very often in the real world because tenant provisioning is usually a one-off task, and if you work with companies that already have an Office 365 tenant, then obviously you don't need to create more tenants for them. But it's worth learning how to do it, and if you're going to follow along with this course, then it is obviously worth you having a trial tenant of your own that you can mess around in without any consequences if you make a mistake. So in this module, we'll go through signing up for an Office 365 tenant; configuring company profile information in your new tenant; configuring First Release options for your organization, which controls when your users receive new features that are rolling out to Office 365; configuring custom app tiles and help info, both of which are designed to help your users find the apps and support information they need to do their job; controlling Office 365 app features, which gets into enabling and disabling certain options within individual Office 365 services. This is usually done so that you can use the different services in alignment with your organization's IT policies; configuring Office 365 client downloads, which controls the version of software, such as Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint, that users get access to install on their computers using the Service Health Dashboard to get information about outages and other service advisories from Microsoft; and using the Message Center as part of your change awareness for Office 365.

Managing Office 365 Licenses
In this module, we're going to look at managing Office 365 licenses. We'll go through how to purchase licenses for your Office 365 tenant, how to assign licenses to user accounts in the Office 365 admin portal, how to use group-based license management to simplify managing licenses for larger organizations, and how to review license usage in Office 365 to help manage your ongoing costs. Now naturally license management is a topic that is closely associated with spending actual money. Yes, we can use a free Office 365 trial, and we can try out most of the features of Office 365, but if we want more users than the trial allows, which is 25 licenses, then we would need to pay for licenses, in fact, we'd first need to pay for the trial licenses before adding more paid licenses to the tenant. Of course, if our trial has ended, then we would need to purchase licenses to continue using the tenant, assuming that we've exhausted all possible trials in the tenant, including extensions to existing trials, which are available. Of, if we want to use some different features that aren't included in the licenses we've already got, then, yes, we need to purchase licenses for those as well. So where does that leave you if you're trying to follow along with this course and learn about license management? Well, I will say that there is no need to spend money just to learn how license management works in Office 365. You can gain an understanding of the mechanics of license management just by watching these videos and by using trial licenses at no cost. Alright, with that, let's move on and look at how to purchase licenses in Office 365.

Managing Office 365 Groups
In this module, we're going to look at managing Office 365 Groups. We're going to go through configuring Groups creation policies in Office 365, configuring Groups options in Office 365, how to create Groups both as an administrator and as an end user, how to manage the membership and managers of Groups, and how to manage some of the Groups-enabled applications that exist in Office 365 today. Just to recap, in the last module we looked at managing distribution groups and security groups, which are two of the three types of groups in Office 365. This module will focus on Office 365 Groups, that's Groups with a big G, which is a collaboration service in Office 365 that provides a shared mailbox, calendar, OneNote, and SharePoint file storage for teams of users. It's important to keep in mind that Groups is a fairly new feature of Office 365, and is in active development. Microsoft is continuing to add features to Groups and build new applications that leverage Groups as a collaboration and membership service. It's entirely likely that Groups will be capable of things that aren't covered in this video, because Microsoft has added something or changed something since the time this was recorded. So, just keep an open mind about what Groups can and can't do based on what you see in this module, and look to resources like the Office 365 road map and office blogs to keep up to date with any new developments in this area. Alright, let's get into it.

Managing Resources
In this module, we're going to look at managing resources in Office 365. We'll cover how to create room and equipment mailboxes in Office 365, how to configure resource mailbox settings to optimize the automated management of resource bookings, how to configure advanced resource options in the Exchange Admin Center, and also we'll briefly look at how to create SharePoint sites just as an overview, and I'll point you to some other courses that dive deeper into that topic. But first, a recap of what exactly are room and equipment mailboxes? Well, they are simply mailboxes in Exchange Online that have additional attributes that you configure for managing automated calendar processing. Automated calendar processing means the resource mailbox will automatically accept or reject meeting requests based on the criteria that you configure, making the resource mailbox a bookable resource by your users. Room mailboxes are resource mailboxes that represent fixed locations, such as meeting rooms or conference rooms in your offices. Equipment mailboxes are used to represent non-fixed location items such as laptops that your staff can borrow, or vehicles that they can book out to drive to customer sites. The important point to remember is that resource mailboxes are designed to save you and your users from having to manually book out resources by creating calendar items or by using old-school paper-based systems. Resource mailboxes, when properly configured, save you time and effort. Okay, let's see how they work.

Managing OneDrive Sharing and Sync
In this module, we're going to go through managing OneDrive Sharing and Sync. We're going to cover configuring OneDrive sharing options, configuring OneDrive synchronization options, configuring OneDrive storage quotas for users, using device access and mobile application policies to control OneDrive access from PCs and mobile devices, and how OneDrive and SharePoint administration overlap in a few areas. Now, just to make sure there's no confusion, I'm going to be using the term OneDrive throughout this module. What I mean by OneDrive is the OneDrive for Business service that is part of Office 365. I'm not talking about the consumer version of OneDrive, which is a different service entirely, although it does share a common synchronization client now on Windows 10 PCs and on mobile devices. So just to be clear, any time I say OneDrive in this module, I mean OneDrive for Business. Okay, let's get started.