Although it’s never recommended, some local businesses have taken their chances at managing and manipulating Office 365 configurations. With so much knowledge needed before making any moves, most of the time we only hear the horror stories from how things went from bad to worse. When it comes down to Office 365 management for your business, you need someone with a proven track record of knowing how to monitor, manage and grow your Office 365 tenant effectively. This includes not OVER sizing/charging.
If you’re serious about managing more seats and growing your business, the time spent can quickly add up. Luckily for you, with a time-tested procedure, your business can take the pain out of managing mutilate Office 365 tenants or sites. I would not advise anyone without expert knowledge of these products to tinker with the settings, so our team has pulled together a list of the 12 tricks to you succeeding in managing Office 365.
Security
- Enable Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365
The majority of data breaches are caused by a simple human mistake: a stolen device, weak passwords, the accidental opening of a phishing email, computers not being patched. The list is endless. By enabling Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA, you’re settling for a higher level of security for user sign-ins, decreasing the risk associated with those unauthorized. Multi-factor Authentication will require employees to confirm logins using at least 2-forms/methods of verification.
- Randomly generated password
- Phone Call Verification
- Smart Card or Token (Virtual or Physical)
- Biometrics
- Initiate Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Office 365
Question is, how easy do you think it is for a VISA card number to be inadvertently sent to contact outside of your organization? A simple slip when entering an email address, and you could be sending the company’s payment information to the wrong person or worse, somebody that has already been hacked! Data Loss Prevention (DLP) assists in the prevention of such scenarios occurring. It prevents sensitive information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, or health records from being leaked outside of your organization. It’s a DLP Policy that allows you to identify, track and protect sensitive information across numerous Office 365 applications:
- Exchange Online
- OneDrive for Business
- SharePoint Online
- Office 2016 Desktop Programs
- Turn Mobile Device Management On
We have ways to manage the login; we also have ways to prevent data from leaving, but managing identity and devices that protect information requires planning concerning the security and identity management of your systems. Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) is designed to help manage and protect employees, devices, applications or systems. It’s this integration suite that enables your company to manage who has access to resources while protecting business and customer information across the network.
- Audit Office 365 Logs: Single Out Events/Correct Issues
If you asked any of our 35 engineers, they would tell you Office 365 tenants make auditing capabilities optional by default on E3 and E5 licensing. It helps internal teams learn what actions users took and can show if a user has removed a document or mingled in the permissions. Choosing whether to capture individual activity has a direct impact on successful auditing. It’s these events employers can use to teach and bring awareness to your team members on strengthening security practices and enabling audit logs.
- Begin Analyzing Office 365’s Secure Score
Office 365 Secure Score is a security analysis tool that analyzes Office 365 environments in terms of how secure your tenant is, made up by fine-tuning the suggested fixes to the desired security or threat intelligence level. Act on improving your security and inform yourself about the best practices and Office 365 subscriptions.
Productivity
- Set Online Protection or a Hybrid Configuration for Exchange
The statistics don’t lie: with 97% of businesses having their mailboxes in Exchange only, the largest portion is leveraging Exchange Online. But if you want to keep mailboxes in an on-premises Exchange environment, or enable Exchange Online Protection, then you will need to configure proper settings for your Office 365 plans.
- Begin Managing Your Business OneDrive
Microsoft debuted the introduction of a new type of synchronization with its latest OneDrive update to clients. The Microsoft OneDrive for Business allows clients to use incremental syncing to avoid creating a local cache file structure. Instead, the cache is kept in the cloud and doesn’t create an entry on employee machines, making Office365 more stable and faster than ever before.
- Mastering Collaboration Tools in Office 365
Outlook is by far Microsoft’s premium email client and is still regarded as one of the best in the business, making it the core of Office 365’s Productivity Tools, with integrations with other applications like a CRM or ERP system. But email is no longer the only means for communication and collaboration anymore; it won’t be disappearing anytime soon, but we’ve already had clients start adopting more effective ways to work within the Office 365 suite.
These are powerful, real-time collaboration tools that include the likes of Microsoft Teams, Office 365 groups, and Delve. All these tools extend your Microsoft Teams sites and expand your document libraries to consist of conversations, files, notebooks, Team Sites, and calendars.
Management
- Plan IT: It All Starts with a Migration
In many ways, planning a migration of your data and documents is like moving homes. You must first define what should be moved and what should be thrown away in the process. This plays a major role in defining and governing your information architecture. Even for experienced IT architects, moving to Office 365 is very different than migrating content from on-premises to another local platform. This is where many internal IT teams can get into trouble.
- Understanding Active Directory Federation Services
Office 365 offers Single Sign-On (SSO) as part of the native Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) by default. Connect your Active Directory with Office 365 to provide employees with a Single Sign-on solution for any of the Office 365 services, for desktop or mobile devices. This will provide generic authentication by storing and transmitting encrypted credentials across the network boundaries, making it easier for end-users to use one login for all the Microsoft applications, like OneDrive, Word, and Outlook.
- Save Time when Managing Office 365
When your managing multiple sites, every minute of your time is precious. Tools should focus on helping to streamline administrative tasks via remote administration of all components within Office 365 from your command line. By utilizing our Office 365 experts, you can set and reuse batches of commands for managing internal employee tenants.
- Setup a Retention Policy that works for Employees
Microsoft provides businesses with the option to set in place archiving specific pieces of information in eDiscovery. The array of options for archiving has widened with Exchange, SharePoint, Skype, OneDrive, and Yammer.
Managing a static cloud application like Microsoft Office 365 can become a burden quickly, with so many tasks being developed for even the smallest business. But it’s never been easier to up your team’s productivity and leave managing technology to a professional. Stop micro-managing your Office 365 tenant – as a Microsoft Partner, and Cloud Solution Provider, we deliver these solutions every day to businesses throughout the SF Bay Area. Begin Talking to a Microsoft Office 365 professional.
