M365 - Exchange Online Center

When thinking of Active Directory, Exchange Server, or even SharePoint, which group object types come to your mind?

Many organizations regard their people as their greatest asset. There is no disputing that the ability to hire great talent is a critical component to success, but in today’s pandemic-work-from-home world these great assets could also pose the greatest risk to your business.

Two organizations each have Microsoft 365 tenants and they want to work together on several projects – some of which run for a limited time and some of which are ongoing. How can these organizations enable their people and teams to collaborate more effectively and productively across their different tenants? Add on top of this, how can this be done in a secure and compliant manner? This article describes several key collaboration options that administrators at each organization can consider as shared goals.

The recent March 15th Microsoft 365 outage would explain why many of your users were complaining and submitting support tickets that day. Unfortunately, that is the least likely scenario for most problems. While Microsoft has occasional issues, the real problem is usually elsewhere.

Office 365 is a tremendous service that we all know and love. With Office 365, IT Pros and end users alike are equipped with a multitude of applications (Exchange Online, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and more) that enable easier collaboration and increased productivity. Something as simple as collaborating on a word document in real time has changed the way people work.

By establishing a hybrid deployment, you can extend the feature-rich experience and administrative control you have with your existing on-premises Exchange Server organization to the cloud. A hybrid deployment also offers support for a cloud-based archiving solution for your on-premises mailboxes with Exchange Online Archiving and may also serve as an intermediate step towards a complete migration of your on-premises mailboxes to Exchange Online.

Customizing and configuring an Exchange organization has been a daily task for Exchange administrators for years. In a local Exchange organization, you can customize mostly anything you like. There is no requirement for enabling the organization for customization. But in Exchange Online, the situation is different.

It’s no secret that the IT landscape has changed dramatically over the past 8 months. Due to the pandemic, organizations have had to pivot overnight, and what was hoped to be a short-term problem has turned into the new normal. This applies to the way these organizations deal with their customers, employees, and business partners.

In many organizations, there is no clear answer for the question "Who really owns Microsoft 365?" And because there's no simple answer, I’ve had to break this blog into two parts.

It is assumed that IT departments own Microsoft 365 (M365), as M365 is a technology platform, and that makes sense. However, in larger organizations, in which IT departments are made up of multiple business units or teams, who owns M365 amongst them?

You may have heard a few terms referencing Microsoft 365 platform success before, such as consumption, activation, usage, uptake and adoption. They may seem clear enough and are certainly buzz words being thrown around the last couple of years, but it’s not necessarily straight forward. It is important to know the lingo and ensure your focus is on the right area or data when it comes to your implementation and your longer-term Microsoft journey.