Chapter 18
Working in Microsoft 365 Admin Center
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting up to speed on the new Admin Center experience
Customizing Admin Center to work with your role and your style
Exploring all the actions you can take from the User Details page
In 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Change is the only constant in life.” More than 2,500 years later, that observation could not be more spot on, especially when it comes to cloud computing.
Ever-changing cloud technology has afforded small businesses the capability to use the same enterprise-class tools that Fortune 500 companies use through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. In this model, it’s easy to scale software licenses up or down, enabling SMBs to pay for only the services they need at any given time, like using electricity. There is no need to invest in expensive infrastructure up front or hire a full staff of skilled IT professionals to manage the IT environment.
Aside from the reduced cost, SaaS users get to enjoy the improvements to the service at a faster clip than before, often at no additional cost. Such is the case for Microsoft 365 Business and other SaaS solutions from Microsoft. If you visit the Microsoft 365 Roadmap web page at www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap, you’ll find that since the service was announced in the middle of 2017, more than 600 updates have been announced, with more than half already launched. So, to paraphrase Heraclitus, “The only constant thing in Microsoft 365 Business is change.”
In this chapter, you get insight into the changes being rolled out in Microsoft 365 Admin Center that help IT admins like you simplify the management of your tenant. You learn how to customize the Admin Center landing page to fit your needs so you can quickly act on tasks that matter most to you. While changes are constantly being rolled out to your tenant, you can stay on top of administering your services and continue to provide value to your organization.
Modernizing IT Management
Microsoft 365 Business is the convergence of three unique but integrated products: Office 365, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Windows 10. Although this convergence is a good thing, having three complex products rolled into one presents challenges. You need to log into many portals to Managing your environment and administering the different services in Microsoft 365 Business requires 23 portals, each with its own look and feel.
For example, suppose you’re the IT admin for a construction firm. In the middle of dealing with ten support tickets, you get a call from your project manager, who is working onsite, to say he’s lost his phone. You drop everything you’re doing and log into https://portal.office365.com to reset the user’s password. Then you log into https://portal.azure.com to find the user’s device and wipe it. Although the tasks themselves are not that difficult, completing them is overly complicated.
This scenario is one of the reasons why the Microsoft 365 Admin Center experience has been updated. As of October 2018, admins who are in the Targeted Release ring may review the new Admin Center experience (the current interface is called the classic Admin Center experience). The first set of features rolled out in the Preview are focused on the most common tasks IT admins perform, based on telemetry data gathered from the millions of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 tenants around the world. All the features in Preview are slated to be rolled out for general availability in the middle of 2019.
Experiencing the new Admin Center
If you’re still logging into https://portal.office365.com to administer your tenant, now is a good time to update your link and go directly to https://admin.microsoft.com. In previous chapters, I started training you to go the new link whenever there are instructions requiring access to Admin Center.
If you’re reading this book before the general availability of the new admin experience, I highly recommend clicking the Try the Preview button. If you don’t see the button at the top right of the page, it means you’re not in the Targeted Release ring.
Assuming you’re still viewing Microsoft 365 Admin Center in the classic experience, follow these steps to participate in the Targeted Release ring:
- While logged in to Microsoft 365 Admin Center, click your company name below the navigation bar.
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In the Organization profile page, click the Edit button next to Release Preferences, as shown in Figure 18-1.
The Release Preferences window appears.
- Select either Targeted Release for Everyone or Targeted Release for Selected Users, and then click the Next button.
- If you select Targeted Release for Selected Users, you can add people by following these steps:
- Click Next.
- In the Release Preferences window, click Yes.
- Click the Add people button.
- Tick the boxes to the left of the users you want to add and then click the Save button.
- Click the Close button, and then click the Close button again to go back to the Organization Profile page.
- Click the Close button to save your changes.
FIGURE 18-1: Editing the Release preferences.
When Preview is enabled, you immediately see the new, streamlined look and feel. Don’t be fooled by appearances. Whether you’re viewing the new experience as a Preview or the default view when it becomes generally available, Microsoft 365 Admin Center is designed to make your life as an IT admin more efficient. You can customize it to fit your role in the organization and act on smart recommendations based on intelligent services running under the hood. Best of all, you have one place to administer the services in your subscription versus going to different portals!
You heard that right. Instead of 23 different portals, you can now log into Microsoft 365 Admin Center and do a variety of tasks in Admin Center or through seven specialist workspaces that can be accessed from Admin Center. In these workspaces, you do granular configurations, view detailed reports, and take advanced actions. The specialist workspaces are as follows:
- SharePoint
- Teams & Skype
- Exchange
- Security
- Compliance
- Device Management
- Azure Active Directory (AAD)
Figure 18-2 is a great illustration of the consolidation of the portals into a single portal with specialist workspaces, courtesy of the marketing folks at Microsoft from the Ignite 2018 conference.
Microsoft Ignite 2018 Presentation
FIGURE 18-2: Microsoft 365 Admin Center specialist workspaces.
Personalizing the experience
Microsoft 365 Admin Center was designed to simplify your tasks as an IT admin. In a small-business scenario, an IT admin might perform most if not all admin roles. For larger companies, the different aspects of the administration might fall under different IT roles. For example, you might have an IT staff who is the global admin, another staff whose responsibility is related to only security and compliance, another IT staff who just administers SharePoint, and so on.
Each IT staff obviously has different tasks and different work styles. As a result, you want to empower them to customize Admin Center to make it their own. In the new Admin Center experience, you can do just that. Here’s how.
From Microsoft 365 Admin Center, note that the left navigation has fewer menu items, as shown in Figure 18-3. Don’t panic — you can still access the other navigation links if you click Show More. You can add or remove items that appear in the left navigation pane by clicking Edit. Any changes you make to the left navigation apply only to you.
FIGURE 18-3: Microsoft 365 Admin Center in Preview mode.
In the right pane, a few cards are grouped under the Essentials group. Note that when the new experience is available generally, you may see more cards than shown in Figure 18-3.
The minimalist look and feel in Admin Center is designed to make the IT admin focus on important tasks. Smart defaults include cards that know what matters to you based on your role. The idea is not to overwhelm an admin with all the cards available when some of those cards don’t apply. For example, if your role is to manage security and compliance, the Billing card may not be important to you.
If you think you’re missing a card on your home page, click the + Add Card button in the top right to display all the cards you can drag to your home page.
One-Stop-Shop User Management
I was traveling out of the country recently when I got a call from a customer’s IT admin. He sounded frantic because they had just fired an employee and were worried that the employee’s son has the technical abilities to hack their system. The IT admin had already removed the license for the user but was confused about where to go to remove the company data from the personal device the employee owned.
Had this event happened today, and the IT admin had Preview mode turned on, I doubt he would be calling me. That’s because in the new Admin Center experience, user management is greatly simplified with a one-stop-shop approach. The user interface is intuitive enough that I doubt I would have had to take a quick break from shopping to deal with a long-distance support call.
Interacting with the Users List
According to telemetry data from Microsoft, 75 percent of admin actions are repetitive. From resetting passwords to adding and removing licenses, these seemingly small but repetitive tasks add up to inefficiencies.
In the new and improved experience, IT admins can manage their users more effectively by taking cues from integrated insights served up by the system. Filtering capabilities have been improved so it’s easy to find one user among hundreds. Inline actions are available, so you don’t have to jump from one page to another to complete a task.
The new Active Users list, shown in Figure 18-4, displays three columns by default: Display Name, Username, and Licenses. Clicking Choose Columns opens a window that allows you to choose other columns to display, such as Sign-In Status and Usage Location.
FIGURE 18-4: Active Users list in the new admin experience.
At the top of the list, below the Active Users label, note the commands you can apply to a selected user or multiple users. Resetting a user’s password, for instance, has gone from two clicks in the old experience to one click in the new experience.
In addition, when you click the three vertical dots next to the user’s name, a menu of quick actions appears, as shown on Figure 18-5.
FIGURE 18-5: Quick actions you can perform on an end user.
Managing users
Remember the real-life scenario I mentioned in the introduction to this section, about the IT admin who had to deal with an employee who was fired? In the new experience he would select the user in the Active Users list to display the User Details page.
The User Details page, shown in Figure 18-6, is the one-stop-shop approach for user management.
FIGURE 18-6: User details page.
At the top, below the username, are icons representing quick actions to reset the password, edit the sign-in status, and delete the user.
The tabs in the User Detail page are where the simplification happens. You can not only view information about the account but also manage the user’s devices, licenses, apps, mail, and OneDrive. In the past, managing a user’s device and the apps assigned to a user would have required a different portal and a tedious process.
Clicking the Devices tab displays all the devices the user is enrolled in — you can even see whether or not a device is compliant. From the same tab, you can either remove company data from the device or reset it to factoring settings (see Figure 18-7).
FIGURE 18-7: Managing devices from the user details page.
Are you wondering about the difference between the Licenses and Apps tab and the User Details page? Think about it this way: To use the service, each user needs to be assigned a license. One user may have more than one type of license. For example, your marketing manager may have a license for Microsoft 365 Business and a license for the standalone higher-tier Microsoft Stream Plan 2 service. You can see which licenses are assigned to a user in the Licenses tab.
Each license comes with apps, which are shown in the Apps tab. If you need to remove an app for a user but don’t necessarily want to remove the license, you can do so in the Apps tab.
The Mail and OneDrive tabs in the User Details page are carried over from the previous Admin Center experience but with additional commands. In the OneDrive tab, for example, you get a cool visual of the user’s storage usage, as shown in Figure 18-8.
FIGURE 18-8: The user’s storage usage is listed on the OneDrive tab.
These and other improvements to Admin Center deliver on the promise of simplified IT management to drive efficiency. Remember, though, that as a SaaS application, Microsoft 365 will continue to evolve and be updated. The images you see in this chapter may be a little different by the time you provision your tenant. When that happens, just know that the changes were made to make your life as an IT admin even more productive.