Exploring Microsoft 365 Admin Center: Part 1 - Microsoft 365 Tutorial

Welcome to the Microsoft 365 admin center, the primary portal for managing everything that is Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 is a true SaaS offering, Software as a Service, where there are many pieces of softwares that are actually bundled in with Microsoft 365. We will look at some of the general settings that apply to all the various software solutions, as well as the individual administrative centers. But let's start with the Microsoft 365 admin center. Here in the primary window, we see various cards. So Microsoft calls these cards. They can be customized and they provide a set of information. I've actually modified some of my cards. And you can add more cards here so that you can have different information represented as part of your dashboard, this primary window that you have here in front of you. You can name it, you can have multiple versions of these and you can configure these to your need. On the left-hand side, you have a series of menus that are used to manage global solutions and global settings. For example, users; this is where we can manage all of our users on all of our groups and all of the permissions that we assign to them. Keep in mind that even though Microsoft 365 is a complete solution, behind the scenes, underneath the covers, we see other Microsoft solutions that are providing some of these services. And when it comes to users and identities, it is Microsoft Entra ID. Microsoft Entra ID is the new iteration of Azure Active Directory or Azure AD, which is what provides the identity services for Microsoft 365. So even though I can click on active users and I see the list of users in my environment, these users actually are Microsoft Entra ID accounts, their identities, security principles that reside within Entra ID. However, I can manage them here on Microsoft 365 because my Microsoft Entra ID tenant is bundled with Microsoft 365. They are one of the same. Anything you do here for these users will also apply if you open up the Microsoft Entra ID admin center. Those two tools will work in conjunction in managing your users. Frankly, everything you need to do for Entra ID accounts, your user accounts here can be done from Microsoft 365. There are some advanced functionalities that we would do in Entra ID, such as implementing conditional access policies, essentially specifying when users can connect and what conditions they need to have in order to connect, as well as multi-factor authentication will be done somewhere else. Right now, it's in a legacy portal, but in the future, it will also move to Entra ID. So everything related to users is done from here, and we will look at all of these settings in details later on in this course. Then I also have my teams and groups. All of your teams and groups are listed here. The teams and groups are used to not only provide distribution list, email list for different users, or even create and provide access to a group of users to access specific resources or for that group of users to perform administrative tasks, but this is also where I create my Microsoft Teams. There is a specialized Teams Admin Center that we will look at later on in this course, but in here I see all of the teams and Microsoft 365 groups that have been created in my environment. I can perform some additional tasks here, such as specifying policies for these teams and groups, as well as deleting them, managing them, and even creating various exchange online solutions such as shared mailboxes and mailbox that can be accessed by multiple users. Again, we will look at all of these settings in detail later on in this course. We also have here roles. The roles and the role assignments can be managed from Microsoft 365 admin center. A role is a set of permissions that have been grouped together into a meaningful name. In this case, we call them a role. So for example, we have a built-in role called an application administrator. And that application administrator is actually a suite of various permissions that are grouped together that all relate to managing applications within your environment. And then it's been given a name of Application Administrator. You can take this role and you can apply it to a user. You'll notice that our roles are categorized in three buckets: Azure AD roles, exchange roles, and billing roles. Billing roles are more specific to managing the subscription and all of the billing that's associated to that. So this is my role assignment pane, which allows me to assign all of the permissions to my various administrators. Then I've got a billing set of options here. The billing set of options is where you would manage all of your licenses and your subscription. This is where you would purchase additional licenses and subscription for the various needs that you have in your organization. For example, you want to provide a new service for your users, such as an access to Exchange Online, or you want to provide some additional encryption functionalities for documentations, or you want to ensure that your users can have access to the Office applications offline. All of these functionalities can be purchased by Microsoft through the various product and license offering. Later on in this course, we will look at all the various relevant billing options that are available here, as well we can also configure our payment methods, which type of subscription we have, look at previous bills and payments that we've done, as well as configure notifications for billing requirements.