Chapter 2
Getting to Know Microsoft 365 Business
IN THIS CHAPTER
Determining which Microsoft 365 plan is right for your business
Managing the Microsoft 365 Business environment
Contributing to your business growth with Microsoft 365 apps
If I had wanted a drone 12 years ago, I would have had to come up with $100,000. Lucky for me, the cost of drones declined so much and so rapidly that I finally got one as a birthday present from my husband and son last year. The cost of the drone? $100. Watching our puppy run in circles in our backyard chasing the drone overhead? Priceless.
Drones are just one of the key technologies that has seen a drastic drop in prices in a short time span. According to a white paper published by the Word Economic Forum, 3D printing used to cost an average of $40K in 2007. Seven years later, that price dropped to $100. In 1984, the average cost for solar power per kilowatt hour was $30. In 2014, that cost went down to 16 cents.
The astounding drop in prices for these and other advanced technologies underscores just how rapidly our world is changing. Moreover, affordable smart devices have made us increasingly connected. With an estimated 1 trillion devices connected to the Internet by 2030 and the mainstreaming of science-fiction-like technologies such as artificial intelligence, businesses of all sizes will have no choice but to adapt to the changing digital landscape to succeed or simply survive.
At home and in the workplace, we are already seeing humans and machines working together to drive efficiency. For example, my Echo Dot (a hands-free, voice-controlled device from Amazon) and I get along well — especially in the morning while I get ready to go to work — when it tells me the top news, the weather, and the traffic on my commute route, and even attempts a lame joke. The Echo Dot does all that from a simple “Alexa, start my day” voice command.
These technological advancements dictate that even a small business needs to have a technology strategy just like its big brother, the enterprise. SMBs need to reevaluate legacy systems that require a lot of maintenance, out-of-support platforms rife with security holes, and fragmented productivity solutions that started out free but ended up costing a lot of money to integrate.
This chapter outlines the value proposition of Microsoft 365 Business and how the solution can help define the technology strategy of an SMB (small- to medium-sized business). I provide guidance for integrating a few of the recent technological innovations into the workplace. I also clarify the use case between the Business and Enterprise editions of Microsoft 365 to enable small-business decision makers to make the right purchasing choice.
Understanding the Microsoft 365 Plans
Although a small business and a large enterprise operate differently, common trends in the workplace affect any organization’s capability to achieve its goals.
The influx of Millennials drives the demand for flexible work arrangements, workspaces that lend themselves to easy interactions, and the use of personal mobile devices. Today’s employees demand an open flow of information and quick access to company data anywhere and anytime so they can get things done. In addition, we see a prolific cottage industry of bad actors and almost daily news about security breaches.
These trends are the impetus for Microsoft 365. Delivered through the cloud, Microsoft 365 simplifies the complicated tasks IT admins would have to perform to run a modern IT environment.
Microsoft 365 is available in two types of plans for businesses: Business (300 or fewer users), and Enterprise (more than 300 users).
Although the focus of this book is on the Business plan, it’s helpful to understand the feature sets in the Business and Enterprise plans to inform procurement decisions, especially because an organization might have a mix of both types of plans.
Breaking down the Enterprise plan
The Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan provides organizations with more than 300 users increased levels of security and compliance management. The plan includes business intelligence and analytics tools not found in the Business plan.
Three key workloads work together seamlessly in Microsoft 365:
- Office 365: A software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed to drive productivity and enhance collaboration
- Enterprise Mobility + Security: An identity-driven cloud solution for security, data privacy, and mobile device and app management
- Windows 10 Enterprise: The operating system for Windows devices with built-in security and simplified platform management
Microsoft 365 Enterprise comes in E3, E5, and F1 plans. The E3 plan has robust features to meet the needs of most users. The E5 plan has additional advanced features such as business intelligence and analytics tools. The F1 plan is targeted for first-line workers, who typically do not sit in front of their computers all day and may not even have their own dedicated devices. In a retail store, these users might be sales associates dealing with customers all day.
Pricing for Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans varies from one Microsoft reseller to another based on discounts and added services. Cloud611 (a company I founded and a Cloud Solutions Provider partner for Microsoft), for example, offers the E3 plan at $35 per user per month, the E5 at $62 per user per month, and the F1 at $12 per user per month. Published prices from the Microsoft website apply when you purchase directly from Microsoft.
Deciding whether the Business plan is right for you
The Business plan is designed to meet the needs of SMBs with 300 or fewer users. It bundles the collaboration tools in Office 365 Business Premium, security features and device management capabilities, and simplified deployment and servicing of Windows 10 Business.
This plan is ideal for small businesses that have little or no IT staff and do not want to manage an on-premises IT environment. Prices vary from one reseller to another. At Cloud611 (www.cloud611.com), Microsoft 365 Business licenses are available at $20 per user per month. You can also sign up for a 30-day free trial of the plan subject to promotional availability.
If you’re wondering how simple it would be to deploy Microsoft 365 Business for an organization, consider this: My 20-year-old son has no prior IT experience but was able to deploy the solution for a customer with 20 users over a weekend. The same customer’s 16-year-old son is now training to be the IT admin for the organization. These two young and tech-savvy Centennials are, in fact, the inspiration for this book.
The fastest way to find out whether Microsoft 365 Business is right for you is to use the decision tree in Figure 2-1. If your situation has some nuances outside the chart, reach out to a Microsoft Cloud Solution Program (CSP) partner such as Cloud611 ([email protected]) for additional guidance.
FIGURE 2-1: Microsoft 365 decision tree: Business or Enterprise plan?
If you make the decision to go with the Business plan and realize you need some but not all of the advanced features in the Enterprise plan, you can purchase add-on services on top of the Business plan. Figure 2-2 give you a quick comparison between the standard and advanced services available in Microsoft 365 Business, Enterprise E3, and Enterprise E5.
FIGURE 2-2: Microsoft 365 plan comparison.
Exploring Admin Center
Microsoft 365 Business is like a matryoshka doll, those nested Russian dolls of decreasing size. Each of the workloads in Microsoft 365 Business contains more services. Unlike the Russian dolls, however, these services do not decrease in size — they expand and extend the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Business.
The Microsoft 365 Admin Center is the IT admin’s management portal for the workloads included in the service. It’s also the landing page for other types of specialist admins who need to administer some aspect of the service.
Getting to know the Admin Center home page
If you were one of the early adopters of Office 365, you would typically navigate to https://portal.office365.com to administer your Office 365 tenant. Since March of 2018, you may have noticed that your URL is redirected to https://admin.microsoft.com and the top bar displays Microsoft Admin Center instead of Office 365 Admin Center.
If you’re new to Microsoft 365, don’t worry — you didn’t miss anything. In fact, you’re in luck because you’ve skipped the pains that previous IT admins had to deal with in the old Admin Center.
To log in to Microsoft 365 Admin Center, you must be an administrator. Bear in mind that Microsoft 365 has various types of admins based on a person’s role in the organization. You might be a global admin, who has access to everything, or you might be a security admin, who has access to only Security Admin Center.
Figure 2-3 shows the current home page experience for Admin Center. The left pane displays the menu navigation. By default, the menus are collapsed, but when you click the arrow to the right of a menu, it will expand to display the submenus.
FIGURE 2-3: Microsoft 365 Admin Center home page.
In this chapter, I am using the classic or current experience of Admin Center. Be aware, however, that updates to Microsoft 365 Admin Center are in progress. Depending on your update release settings and when you’re reading this book, you might see the Try the Preview toggle switch to enable the new experience. I go into more details about the new experience in Part 6.
To the right of the menu are several elements. The Search box at the top is a quick way to jump directly to an item or a task. For example, you can type the name of a user in the Search box and then click the name of the user to perform tasks such as resetting the password or updating the license for the user.
When you first set up Microsoft 365 Business, the Setup wizard shown below the Search box in Figure 2-3 appears. After the setup is complete, the wizard will go away.
The most common tasks for administering Microsoft 365 Business are displayed as cards in the Admin Center home page. Although you can access these tasks also on the menu, using the cards is faster.
Discovering admin centers
Remember the discussion about workloads in Microsoft 365? Well, each of those workloads has its own admin center, which you can access by expanding the — surprise! — Admin Centers menu in the left navigation pane, as shown in Figure 2-4. This image was taken with the classic, or current, experience (as opposed to the new experience, which is in preview as of December 2018).
FIGURE 2-4: Expanded view of Admin Center in the classic experience.
As you peek inside each admin center, you’ll find a universe of additional services you can configure and customize. Do not fret, though. Microsoft 365 Business is already configured for the most common SMB scenarios, so you need to customize only some features based on the need of your business. For example:
- Exchange Admin Center: Enables an IT admin to configure additional policies and rules. In the Advanced Threats section, for example, you can turn on advanced threat protection for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams to prevent users from opening and downloaded malicious files in those locations.
- Teams and Skype for Business Admin Center: Provides a consolidated dashboard for managing communications and web conferencing services. You can set up meetings and messaging policies and enable external and guest access so people outside your organization can, for example, join teams. It even has cards with help articles to help you administer teams.
- SharePoint Admin Center: Displays the activities across SharePoint Online. You can manage sites, restore deleted sites, and even migrate data from on-premises SharePoint sites.
- Security & Compliance Center: Displays the security management, compliance configurations, reporting, tracking, and even your organization’s secure score! (A secure score is like your credit score but instead reveals your current risk profile so you can know what, if anything, you need to do to improve your security posture.)
With cloud technologies, services are never in their final state. By nature, cloud services are designed to be ever-changing to keep up or respond to the current computing environment. The same is true for Microsoft 365. In this chapter, I refer to admin centers in the current experience. When the new experience is fully rolled out sometime late 2019, these admin centers will be referred to as specialist workspaces.
Growing Your Business with the Bookings App
Hair highlights, pet grooming, photo shoots, and tax advice all have one thing in common: appointments. When your small business provides services to customers, having the capability to automate the appointment setting process and allow customers to self-serve is a major stress relief.
The Bookings app in Microsoft 365 Business allows business owners to reduce the time spent setting up appointments by allowing customers to do it themselves from the web. After an appointment is set, you can send auto-reminders to minimize no-shows.
Administering Bookings licenses
The Bookings app is enabled by default for the entire organization in Microsoft 365 Business, as shown in Figure 2-5.
FIGURE 2-5: The Bookings app settings.
If you want to disable the Bookings app for a user, do the following:
- Navigate to
https://admin.microsoft.com - Click the Users menu on the left navigation and select the Active Users submenu.
- Select a user from the list, and then click Edit on the Product Licenses row.
- Toggle the switch next to Microsoft Bookings to Off, and then click Save.
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Click Close, and then click Close again.
You return to the Active users screen.
Installing the Bookings app
To install Bookings, do the following:
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While logged in to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, click the app launcher icon (shown in the margin).The icon appears at the top left of the screen.
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In the list of apps, click Bookings.
If the Bookings app icon is not displayed, click the All Apps link below the icons.
- On the Bookings page, click the Get It Now button.
- In the window that pops up, click Add a Booking Calendar.
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In the Welcome to Setup window, enter your business name and business type and then click Continue.
The system will take a few minutes to set up Bookings. When it’s finished, the Bookings page will display a new user interface with a wizard for configuring Bookings.
To configure Bookings, simply follow the Setup wizard, starting with the first card on the left (Set Your Business Hours). After you finish the tasks for each of the cards, click the Home icon in the left pane to get back to the Bookings home page.