Office 365 administration involves managing core services like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams, along with user accounts, subscriptions, and security policies. While the Office 365 Admin Center centralizes many tasks, application-specific admin portals and PowerShell are often required for advanced or bulk operations. Effective Office 365 administration ensures secure collaboration, streamlined user management, and compliance across the cloud environment.
Cloud solutions often promise to reduce administrative overhead by eliminating the need to install and maintain applications in the organization’s environment. Unfortunately, that does not always equate to less overload for administrators, because it’s still another system that needs to be set up and managed to ensure a positive experience for the company’s business users.
Managing Microsoft Office 365 is no exception. It includes several applications that need to be managed; here are just the main ones:
- Exchange Online
- SharePoint Online
- OneDrive for Business
- Skype for Business
- Office Suite
You can manage the cloud environment of your enterprise through the Office 365 Admin Center. For some tasks, you can use Microsoft PowerShell, which is especially useful for bulk operations, such as provisioning multiple user accounts at the same time. The main features in Office 365 admin center include the following:
- User provisioning and de-provisioning
- Managing subscriptions and billing statements
- Managing groups, including distributions lists, security groups and shared mailboxes
- Accessing Office 365 service health information
- Access to other admin centers, including the Azure AD, SharePoint and Exchange admin centers
Settings of specific applications, such as SharePoint Online and Exchange Online, can be managed only in their respective admin centers. For example, administering SharePoint site collections requires you to go to SharePoint Admin Center, and when configuring the Exchange Online environment, you’ll turn to the Exchange Admin Center, which is also called the Exchange Management Console and is nearly identical to the web-based EMC included in the on-premises version to manage Exchange server.
In addition, Microsoft offers Security & Compliance Center, which supposed to help you manage compliance features across the platform, including data loss prevention, advance threat protection, eDiscovery and more.
As you can see, Office 365 administration is not an easy thing to do. There are some tools available that can make your life a little bit easier, but no software will do the administration for you. To help you learn how to make the most of this cloud technology and the associated resources and navigate through the complex administrative environment of Office 365, we put together a series of blog posts that explain administration in simple terms. Read them all to master your administrative skills, so you can create a secure and efficient cloud environment.
- Ten Most Useful Office 365 PowerShell Commands
- How to Manage User Accounts in Office 365
- Office 365 Groups and How to Manage Them
- How to Sync Your Active Directory to Office 365
- How to Configure and Manage Office 365 Email Encryption
- How to Set Up a Hybrid Office 365 and Migrate to Exchange Online
- Exchange Online Protection Setup
- Must-Know Basics of Successful Office 365 Troubleshooting
- Managing Office 365 DLP (Data Loss Prevention)
- Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection
- How to Use OneDrive Admin Center and Increase Storage Quotas
- Litigation Hold and eDiscovery in Office 365
- Manage Exchange Online with Ease: Steps and Tips
- SharePoint Online Administration, Step by Step
- Using AD to Add an Alias to an Office 365 Email Account
- Office 365: Configuring User Passwords to Never Expire
- Best Security and Management Tools for Office 365
