Microsoft 365 The Absolute Beginner's Guide for Admins

in this episode we're going to take a look at the Ultimate Guide to getting started with Microsoft 365 for administrators and I guarantee The Ultimate Guide are you ready foreign [Music] greetings fellow YouTubers welcome to the channel and here so nice to see you I really do appreciate it you know I was looking through all my videos yesterday and I would realize I don't have one single video on actually getting started with Microsoft 365 and I thought gosh that's weird I've done lots of little videos with like the various topics but nothing definitive so this is going to be more than a video this is an absolute beginner's guide to Microsoft 365 for admins to get up and running all right so what we're going to do is I'm going to talk about the different plans and how it works we'll talk about the different portals and how they work talk about creating users and Licensing then ultimately we'll talk about groups and how groups work and I'm also going to talk a little bit about admin roles as well so kind of the kind of five key core areas that will really get you up and running with Microsoft 365 in less than no time now if you've got questions comments about this or any of my other sessions I love those get them down below and if you enjoy the session please hit the like button I really do appreciate it and if you want to subscribe we'd love to have you on board so help hit that subscribe button up there ring that Bell and you'll be notified of new videos so I think without any further Ado I've got a little presentation which is intermixed with lots of demos so stay tuned because I guarantee you will learn something here let's get started and I hope you enjoyed the session a quick look then at an absolute beginner's guide for administrators in Microsoft 365. so this is perfect if you're just coming to the platform or if you already know the platform that you might find things here that you may not necessarily know so I'm going to talk about what is Microsoft 365. we're going to talk about where it's really come from but also where do all the different pieces kind of fix together and what are they well if you're an old-timer like me um well back in the 1960s I was a baby so I wasn't that guy um but really um I suppose the 1980s are really when things started and we went through the client server era and as as I always tell my students that's a little bit like um the industrial revolution of the 1800s so basically you go into work in the morning you work in the factory at the end of the day you come out the factory and it's just the same with the computers as it was then so we weren't 24 7 in those days then of course we had the mobility era everybody's walking around with mobile devices now and now life in the cloud it really doesn't matter what type of device that you use really now it's how I can consume my data and how I can consume it in a secure way yeah so when we talk about 365 um 365 has really been evolving over a number of years it started out as a product called bpos the business productivity online suite and you know that marketing guy doesn't work at Microsoft anymore it then went to Office 365 and of course it's now uh Microsoft 365 and it's essentially as a service so basically it's everything's hosted in Microsoft data centers throughout the world so whether it be Microsoft Exchange online Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft teams so these are the core products that really kind of get things moving in Microsoft 365. now in addition to the core products of course and you also get additional products thrown in as well and you can basically add on essentially what you want or what you need for your business and you can do these on an either on an ad hoc basis or you can have them over a yearly subscription so when we talk about the benefits of 365 really we're talking about the fact that hey you know you do want to use the Cloud app so we have something called the F plans so the F plans are essentially kind of kiosk plans so if you work in a call center let's say you might not need um an actual install of Microsoft Office you might be happy with the online version which are excellent by the way whereas if you're uh obviously a a busy or a heavy user you maybe got a laptop you maybe travel then you definitely want to have an installed copy of Microsoft apps nice thing about this of course is it's a subscription service so essentially um all you're always going to be up to date so you never need to go out and purchase the new software you will always have the latest version the downside of that though is that you're responsible for your Hardware so you need to make make sure that your Hardware can meet those requirements um of course the idea is that irrespective of the device that you're coming in on you're always going to get a great um kind of optimized experience of course other than the free version so you know I'm often asked what's the difference between Microsoft 365 and the likes of OneDrive Andy I get a free version of 365 with that you do but you don't get a service level agreement so an SLA is a guarantee of quality guarantee of uptime and of course it's financially backed as well um of course you get Advanced I.T controls in place link gosh link doesn't exist anymore that's a slightly older slide apologies for that of course it's now Microsoft teams um so understanding where your data is stored this is the Microsoft data center in Dublin in Ireland and your data will be stored in vast data centers like this either regionally or in many cases now locally so local data centers are needed obviously if you're if you want to store financial information government information and so on or proprietary information for compliance reasons it needs to be stored in your local data center now I'm often asked Andy what is the best plan for me how do I select the best plans well as I've mentioned obviously Microsoft have their various Services there so teams SharePoint exchange and so on what they then do is they basically put them into service plan plans so these are the capabilities that are offered to a tenant user so for example SharePoint online for Enterprise now when we talk about the service plans we then put them into skus so for example an E5 SKU Microsoft 365 business or business premium the smaller business plans can handle up to 300 users and the Enterprise plans such as E3 and above can have essentially unlimited numbers of users so what are the layers of 365 well basically we've got essentially the portals on top so you've got the landing pages you've got the LA the sign-in experience you've got tenant administration of course and then you've got the user portals on top of that underneath you've got the platform services so Commerce and billing you've got Microsoft's identity platform it's Authentication platform of course it's internet DNS Services you've got SharePoint online you've got exchange online teams and of course you've got Yammer and all those other communication tools as well so now when we talk about navigating the cloud one of the first things that you need to know is how and what are all the different portals so let's take a quick look at that so a good place to start I suppose is at the beginning and this is our welcome to Microsoft 365 screen so the place to get started for admins is first of all we go over here into the admin Center so let's take a look at that so here in the admin Center this is your portal your window to the world to view everything um you can you have first of all you'll notice that we have these cards now you can move these and drag and drop these and and arrange them to exactly how you want them to look you can also add new cards as well so I can change the dashboard view I can customize it you can even go into dark mode if you want to and you can also jump back into light mode again whatever you prefer now in terms of the various portals we have a number of portals here and one of the first things that you'll you might find a little overwhelming is first of all click on show all so this is the main Microsoft 365 admin portal and you'll get what we call a generic set of tools here so you can manage your users teams and groups admin roles you'll manage your resources the marketplace this used to be the billing section and so these two kind of go together so if you want to add features and functionality you can do that billing of course you know for paying your accounts then you've got supports so help desks you've got your Microsoft 365 admin settings and again this can be a little overwhelming because there are many settings um set up so initial setup getting started and you can either do this through a manual setup or you've got this guided setup here that will take you through the whole thing we also have a series of reports so you can produce reports who are your heaviest users what are the busiest sites and that kind of thing and we also have the overall health so you get this nice Health dashboard what's the overall health of Microsoft 365. please note that this relates to your local data center so you can see there's no critical alerts no problems now again depending on your license or your SKU or your plan that you're subscribed to you may get some or all of these settings all right so um the other portals that we have we have a number of different admin centers so we have the security admin Center and this portal can either be managed by yourself or a dedicated Security administrator and the name of this portal is Microsoft 365 Defender and this is where you would manage all the security for your tenant so things like um anti-malware anti-spam anti-virus things like attachments securing endpoints vulnerabilities and so on again if you're interested in this area check out my playlist for Microsoft 365 Defender I've got quite a few videos in this area to help you get started now in addition we also have the Microsoft purview portal so Microsoft purview is all about compliance and we live in an increasingly compliant world so this is not just protecting your users but also protecting your things like Communications ensuring that they are compliant things like data loss prevention policies so ensuring data doesn't leak outside of your or confidential data doesn't leak things like credit card information and so on you can also do things like labeling and classification with information protection so you can label sensitive information for example it can either be encrypted or you can put rules on that prevent this being sent outside your company absolutely superb and then of course you've got things like um a data loss prevention so our data retention I should say so things like retaining data for compliance reasons so if you'd like to know more about purview then check out my compliance playlist and Microsoft purview on my YouTube channel all right um next one down is endpoint manager soon to be renamed as the InTune portal so in tune in fact there you go you can see it's now been updated um InTune manages all of your mobile and physical devices within your organization so this can include Windows iOS Mac OS devices Android Chrome and Linux devices as well so you can enroll devices into your organization and you can then manage those through what we call configuration policies and you can set compliance policies as well so you can prevent users from for example installing applications or older versions of software that you don't want to support now in addition to that you can also of course manage users apps you can deploy apps to users devices you can manage things like updates um to make sure that their systems are up to date and this is the job of InTune admin Center in addition you've also got tools like endpoint security and endpoint security can prevent um bugs and security issues from arising on mobile devices for example so again we have a lot of security features here and if you'd like to know more about this then please check out my InTune playlist on my YouTube channel next one down um very important is the Azure active directory admin Center so Azure active directory is the heart of everything that we do in 365. it manages all our users and groups and you're probably thinking hang on a minute Andy there's something wrong here um I just saw in the Microsoft 365 admin Center something called users and you're quite right and in fact if I go into the users here you'll see that I have a list of users and likewise if I go into my Azure active directory admin Center and click on users again you'll see a list of those same users so which one would I use to be honest it doesn't matter all right now because this is a cloud service you'll probably end up working with both if I have to be honest with you all right now um some features can only be managed in the 365 portal whereas some features can only be managed in the Azure portal I know what you're thinking do you isn't there a portal kind of one for all an all-for-one unfortunately not that's the nature of the cloud I'm afraid but with a little practice you'll soon get the hang of it so Azure active directory is the core identity service in Microsoft 365. all right so what else have we got here well um other other admin centers include Microsoft Exchange online so in here you can see you can manage all of your mail how mail flows into your organization mail migration so migrating mail in to your organization from various sources this is a super powerful feature a again it can be managed either by a global admin or in many cases you might have a dedicated exchange mail admin within your organization so all our storage is managed in SharePoint here and this is the main storage for things like Microsoft 365 groups and teams as well please note you can also manage OneDrive for business in here as well and then of course we have the teams admin Center so Communications chat collaboration this is where your team's administrator would sit and they would manage all the communications so everything from meetings to teams voice um so things like deploying teams apps to your users in Microsoft teams managing teams devices such as things like teams rooms collaboration systems and so on again if you're interested in teams check out my team's playlist on YouTube okay so having looked at the portals then what what is the next most important thing are you going to be a scenario where you are on premises so many companies still have an on-premises kind of infrastructure in place or are you going to go directly to the cloud with the likes of Microsoft Azure now of course Azure and ITS Technologies allow me to communicate and connect with lots of different platforms so you know there's lots of basically Microsoft call themselves now a multi-cloud solution so whether you're working with Amazon or Google you can link in with Azure active directory for that you might also want to work with customers or partners and we have a B2B platform the capabilities to not just have your own internal users but also invite guests from Partnerships or customers to collaborate yes so of course tools like Microsoft of teams are fantastic we also have another type of identity called um b2c or business to Consumer so if you're let's say developing your own app for um your website and you want your users to be able to register for that website well of course users or customers might not have an Azure account so again they can come in and they can sign in Via their Facebook page or their Twitter page or something like that now what about on-premises well if you've got on-premises active directory of course that's the traditional active directory service of Windows Server then we're going to need to get how do we get those users into the cloud so for that on premises you install a tool called Azure ad connect or Azure ad connect Cloud sync and what this tool does it essentially connects to your on-premises environment you put in your credentials for on-premises you put in your credentials for cloud it then connects those two components together and essentially it pulls users groups and contacts into your Azure portal and it connects them it links them together all right now once you've done that of course you can then license those users and we refer to this as a hybrid scenario if you want to know more about about that check out my identity and playlist because I go through this in much more detail well so Azure provides the directory service for Microsoft now this is the next generation of directory services and you can see it comes in a number of different flavors so there's a a free version actually there's the basic Edition um so the basic Edition is great if you're using you know a kind of business versions of azure active directory and then of course we have a couple of versions of Premium which give you even greater functionality for example enhanced security features and so on so identity is super important so how are your users going to authenticate well you can use tools like password hash sync and password hash sync is very clever so when a user account replicates States from on-premises into the cloud with the hybrid scenario the only component or attribute that doesn't come along is the user's password so what happens with that well it goes through a mathematical cryptographic process called a hashing algorithm and essentially it produces a a fixed kind of value a long long long series of digits and essentially that goes through two hashing algorithms plus something called salting where it throws a random number on the end and it's that value this long value that's stored in Azure so when the user authenticates they essentially compare their hash value with what's on what they have on premises with what they've got in the cloud so at no point is a password ever replicated across you can also have Federated identities and these provide provide things like single sign-on Solutions so what about the admin tools that are available well we have the admin Center of course the 365 admin center now I don't know if you've seen the admin tool for mobile devices there's also one for Android as well as Apple devices there so you can go ahead and you can download that as well now as well as the portals of course we also have Powershell incredibly powerful command line tool and if you're a developer of course then you can use the management the various apis or application programming interfaces so as you can see here you've got the 365 admin Center here you've got the Azure portals you've got Powershell and you've got the 365 admin app so I suppose the next demo should be let's take a look now at managing users and Licensing so when we talk about creating users and so on in Microsoft 365. the first thing that we need to think about is where are we going to create things this is what we call Microsoft enter and Microsoft enter essentially is the identity portal in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 and you can see the first thing it talks about tenants what is a tenant and think of act our Azure active directory as a filing cabinet and Microsoft look after this filing cabinet So within the filing cabinet you'll have a draw and this is your tenant So within your tenant you will essentially manage all of your users groups devices and you're responsible for that you can either be a what we call a global admin or you can assign um kind of lower admin roles or dedicated admin roles to other users so for example you might have users who manage exchange or SharePoint and so on so in creating users as I've mentioned we can create a user object in Azure active directory but of course you can also create the same users in Microsoft 365 as well and you can do exactly the same thing so again there is no one portal to rule them all here so essentially we can do this from either location there are some features that are only available in Microsoft 365 and there are some features available in Azure active directory and either portal initially this may seem a little confusing but believe me you'll quickly get used to it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come into active users and one of the first things that we're going to want to do is create a user here and I'm going to create a user I'm a big Trekkie so I'm going to create a user here called Jean-Luc um and we'll call him Jean-Luc Picard all right and you can see it puts the display name in and I can put in a username now just a quick tip um you don't want to call the user Jean-Luc or Bob or Steve um the reason I mean you could do if there was only one Jean-Luc in the company or one Steve in the company but if you've got you want to have a decent naming standard so in this case a common naming standard is to use the surname followed by an initial one of the things you may want to take a look at on my YouTube channel in my tips and tricks playlist is all about DNS and Microsoft 365 and it shows you how you can create your own custom domain name so if you don't want this tenant dot on microsoft.com you can of course you can create your own so Bob's boats.com or whatever your domain name might be and that's really really simple I'm going to click next and now it asks me hey you know first of all where do you want the user to be located now this is really important for compliance reasons so for example in this example I'm located in the United States but again you can choose whether you wanted to be in the UK or in Norway or in wherever it might be and this is where their data is going to be resident and that's really important the next thing we want to do is of course assign a license for Jean-Luc and you can see there are a number of different license plans available again one of the things you might want to do is just before you sign up for 365 if you haven't already done so is just have a look at the different plans that Microsoft has to offer and just to remind you by the way you can try all of these for free so this is a great way to learn the different plans and the different features and you can scroll down and it shows you what features are available with the different plans okay now in addition you can also bolt things onto your plan as well so for example I am going to let's say give Jean-Luc I'm going to give him an E5 subscription but at the same time I'm gonna bolt on the Enterprise Mobile quality and security so this gives him an InTune license but it also adds in some additional security features as well now Jean-Luc is using a Windows 11 laptop so I'm going to create a a license for that as well in fact that's actually included in the license now just as well as that you can see all the apps that the license provides for the user now Andy what if a user you don't want a user to have a particular app well all you do is just uncheck that app and you're pretty much done all right so I'm going to click next and the next thing then I mentioned these things called roles so um the the moment by default the user has no admin access um but if you do want him to have some kind of admin access you can obviously assign what we call an admin role now just to let you know that the global administrator is God basically and this guy can pretty much do anything um I generally wouldn't recommend that so you want to really keep the number of global admins to an absolute minimum for best practice but let's say for example um you want him to be a SharePoint administrator or teams so you want Jean-Luc to manage all your collaboration features well this is called our back role-based access control so I'm just giving him the permissions that he needs not necessarily what he wants again for more details on role-based access control please check out my identity playlist and I have dedicated videos on this subject I'm going to click next and there we go I have now created my user so just one last little thing which is a really cool tip by the way when you finish creating the user off it will go and it will create that user account it can take a few minutes one of the things that you can do is you can actually name this user and you can make it a template all right and when you create a template um I'm not going to create a template here with this particular user but if I did I give it a name let's say full-time staff and so on this is really cool because if I go and create a new user again instead of just adding a user I can add in a template and here's some templates that I created previously so I've gone ahead I've created John Luke so here he is I can go into Jean Luke's account now and we can see that in here you can manage all of his devices you can manage or you can see if he's got any devices rather assigned you can see what licenses Jean Lucas got again and you can change these licenses so in the old days of course if you change the license it might have caused serious problems it doesn't anymore we can see jean-luc's mail email settings here so if you'd like to know more about exchange then check out my exchange playlist on my YouTube channel as well finally we have uh Jean Luke's OneDrive and at the moment this is still provisioning so it's not complete yet so if I came back in a little bit of time that would be finished the other thing you can do of course is you can also add in some contact information for Jean-Luc here as well I can also reset jean-luc's password I can block his sign in if I don't think he's ready to be signed in yet and ultimately I can also delete the user as well just a quick point about deleting a user if you delete a user essentially what will happen is it goes into the deleted users containers and it goes in here for up to 30 days so should I want to restore a user back and here I've got I use this one before if I've got a user here called Captain Cook I can simply restore this user back okay so there we go that's that user are restored so there you have it just the basics of creating and Licensing a user account so what are some of the things that can affect your desktop for example well of course we have the office apps and you can download the office apps from your portal or they can be pushed out to you via an administrator now in terms of Licensing you can have for the desktop product you can have up to five PCS or Macs in terms of mobile devices you can have more so potentially you can have like 15 different devices if you want to you can roam with those devices so you can open an item and open a document on one item and continue it on another item as I said upgrades are always included it's super easy to install and I'm sure many of you have already deployed this now I'm often asked how do we keep your content safe well um super easy so for let's take one drive for business for example um so OneDrive for business essentially of course you're working on a document you save it to your desktop this is then synced to your local data center and it's synced to a data array which is then replicated so again we have a it's rated which means it's mirrored and you also get a duplicate copy of it now that rack is also replicated to a second rack in the data center so that's four copies of your data before we even start that those racks are also replicated to a sister data center for additional Security on top of that of course we also have scheduled backups and just in time restore points or preview as versions as you maybe want to call them and I actually showed this recently in my recent OneDrive video on how you can get a restore back okay so super cool features and as you can see there's at least 10 copies of your data I'm often asked Andy is it a good idea to think about a third-party backup well that's something I'm going to be addressing in a future uh episode of this show so watch out for that now I'm often asked what about migration so if I want to migrate my content into Microsoft 365 what are the options well typically with male migration you go into the exchange admin Center and we have essentially four options so an IMAP migration is essentially where I can migrate just mail so this would just bring just emailing them from the likes of any third-party product that you're using so if it's not exchange it would just bring in the email if you are using Exchange on premises then you can either use something called a cut over migration or a staged migration now technically these are almost identical but one the one thing that's different is with an IMAP migration I would need to create all the user accounts and mailboxes first and essentially when you run the migration it's just a connector that's connecting from the all mailbox to the new mailbox and it's copying the content across with a cut over and staged mailbox it creates the mailboxes and the user accounts for us so we don't need to create all of that stuff so during the migration process it creates the user accounts and mailboxes copies the content across and then all we need to do is license the user at the end with a hybrid deployment this is if you have a more complex environment maybe thousands of users and you can't do a migration over the weekend so this is great it's designed to be a kind of a a longer term connector if you will and the idea is that you can then move users mailboxes across as you know whatever's convenient for you and at the end of the day you can then cut that card and send that old acrosty server on its way content services for 365 of course um it's all about collaboration isn't it so um at the very heart of 365 we have SharePoint which SharePoint of course is responsible for storage of all our files and of our data on top of that as well as users you can create groups as well and groups are particularly powerful because you can assign group owners and there are different types of groups so in addition to a security group we can also have a Microsoft 365 group and this offers a fully collaborative experience so you can have things like a shared mailbox shared calendar a planner a SharePoint team site and so on and if you want to go one step further you can extend the capabilities of the Microsoft 365 group to become a Microsoft team and A Team means that you can communicate with it you can set up chat functions and you can also assign third-party apps to it as well so SharePoint of OneDrive uh really it's all about storage SharePoint provides the storage for groups and teams OneDrive for business provides the storage for users so the last thing that I just want to do is let's take a quick look now at managing groups so next let's talk about teams and groups and to do this I'm going to click in the admin Center and I'm going to go into active teams and groups first of all now first of all you'll notice here that you have got four types of groups so a security group is exactly as it says on the tin it's for assigning permissions and nothing more and really this is to do with the levels of collaboration that you want to have in Microsoft 365. a mail-enabled security group is just a security group that's attached to a distribution list that's it so it's not mailbox enabled it doesn't have a mailbox it's just mail enabled you can also have just a distribution list on its own so for Distributing mail and things like that and we also have this a Microsoft 365 group a Microsoft 365 group is a fully collaborative group and it contains a number of different Microsoft Technologies let me show you so I'm going to create a new Microsoft 365 group I'll click next I'm going to call this my Aberdeen HQ and I'm going to click I could put in a description but I'll just click next here do I want to assign an owner so an owner is like a manager do you want to assign a member of Staff who's going to manage this for me so in this case I'm going to assign myself so I've got a user here just it's a little demo User it's just called CDX and I'll bring this user in um next I want to add some members to the group so who do I want to add in well I'm going to bring in Alex I'll bring in Alan I'll bring in B hanker and I think I'll bring in Cameron and Christy so I'm gonna I've got five users here I'm gonna add them into the group now I've mentioned that I want this to be a Microsoft 365 group so I'm just going to put in the name of the group which you can change anytime and you'll notice that you can email this group this is an emailable group we also can now assign a sensitivity label so is this a confidential group is it managers and again you can assign this sensitivity label based on the sensitivity of the group you can also manage the privacy of it so is it going to be a public or a private group private groups can only be accessed by members of that group whereas a public group can be accessed by anyone so I'll make this public and I'll show you what I mean do you want to create a team for the group so I'm going to say no just for the purpose of this demo and I'll click next and I'm going to go off and create that group so I'm going to create the group and let's have a quick look at what that group looks like so I'm going to go into let's say Microsoft Outlook here and here in Outlook you can see as well as my mailboxes I've also can scroll down and you can see I've got a number of groups here and I can see that there are a number of groups I can discover groups so I can come in here and I can say yeah I want to discover a group called Aberdeen and you can see that in fact we do have a group called Aberdeen now because this was a public group as I mentioned anyone can join that group if this was a private group you can request access to the group all right so I've now joined that group and if I just close that down you can now see that here I am in the Aberdeen HQ group so what we have is first of all we have a shared mailbox and we have let me just close that down we have a shared mailbox you also have um shared document Library so we can share a document Library so color for collaboration you have a shared calendar and you've got a notebook planner a team site and so on not a team site but a SharePoint website rather now um okay so what's the difference between this and a Microsoft team well a team is an extension of a Microsoft 365 group so if I just come out of Outlook first of all and if I come back into teams so come back in here to teams so when I click on to Aberdeen HQ I have a number of options and it says would you like to add Microsoft teams to this group now if you join a team this is an irreversible action and what it does it extends the capability of the group to become a team in other words you can use it in Microsoft teams to collaborate and share resources and you can also use third-party apps with the team rather than just the Microsoft ones so I'm going to say yeah I think I'll do that let's go ahead and click onto that all right so the other thing that we might want to do is you might want to say okay if I want to add some members to the team if I want to in teams of course you can have kind of sub channels so I can create channels there and then finally in the settings I can say hey do you want to let people outside of the organization join the team or the group so yes you can do that and again you've got that same privacy sharing settings that we had before all right um again four groups if you want to see a more detailed presentation on groups please check out my identity playlist um on my YouTube channel so there you have it getting started with Microsoft 365 especially for you guys the administrators hey I really hope you enjoyed it and if you did bump that like button up there it does make a difference to the channel and if you've not subscribed well come on on board hit that subscribe button up there ring that Bell and you'll be notified of new videos coming up and I've got some cool stuff planned as well thanks very much comments questions of course as always get them down below and I'll do my best for you that's it for this time you stay safe I'll see you soon hey thanks so much for dropping by today here's a couple of videos that you may enjoy and while you're here go ahead click on the Subscribe button and you won't miss out [Music] foreign

Channel: Andy Malone MVP

Views: 216,100

Keywords: Microsoft 365 The Absolute Beginners Guide, Get started with Microsoft 365, How does Microsoft 365 work?, Andy Malone MVP

Id: 0ap-bTGNZF0

Length: 47min 7sec (2827 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023