Tony Redmond - Office 365 for IT Pros (Fifth Edition)

Office 365 for IT Professionals (2019 Edition)

Published by Tony Redmond

Copyright 2015-2018 by Tony Redmond.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the authors.

The example companies, organizations, products, domain names, email addresses, logos, people, places and event depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, people, domain name, email address, logo, person, place, or event is intended or should be inferred. The book expresses the views and opinions of the authors. The information presented in the book is provided without any express, statutory, or implied warranties. The authors cannot be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused either directly or indirectly by this book.

Although the authors are members of Microsofts Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program, the content of this book solely represents their views and opinions about Office 365 and any other technologies mentioned in the text and is not endorsed in any way by Microsoft Corporation.

Please be respectful of the rights of the authors and do not make copies of this eBook available to others.

Fifth (2019) edition. Previous editions:

• Office 365 for Exchange Professionals (May 2015 and September 2015).
• Office 365 for IT Pros (3rd edition June 2016).]
• Office 365 for IT Pros (4th edition June 2017).

The authors issue regular updates for this eBook until they publish a new edition, usually after a year. People who buy the book through gumroad.com can use their accounts to download updates as they become available. Updates are also available for the Kindle edition, but this depends on the willingness of Amazon to make purchasers aware that an update exists. We try to persuade Amazon of this need about once a month.

The Kindle version of the companion volume for this book is available separately. This book contains valuable information about Office 365, but its information that we dont update as often.

This is update published on 14 December 2018. You can find information about the changes made in each update in our change log or through our Facebook page .

The photo used on the front cover is of a Galapagos land iguana taken on South Plaza island by Tony Redmond in February 2018.

Foreword

During my time at Microsoft I've worked on productivity clients, servers, and services with some of the most dedicated professionals in the industry not only my colleagues here at Microsoft but also the larger community of our customers, partners, and MVPs. We have been unified in the pursuit of our mission to use IT to enable people and organizations everywhere to achieve more. Over the last 10 years, we have been on the journey to deliver these capabilities through Office 365.

The role of IT has transformed. With cloud services and, especially, with Office 365, your role in IT can deliver more critical and time-saving capabilities to end users, as well as to your peers in security, compliance, and developer roles. Office 365 sits at the forefront of this, with the latest teamwork, productivity, and security controls that leverage the intelligence of the cloud and AI to help instrument innovation, like real-time threat protection or tooling that makes communicating ideas fast and effective. IT plays a critical role in how the resulting controls and configurations like these are rolled out and delivered to end users. These controls are often incredibly detailed and customized to meet the specific requirements of each organization, so each decision and policy requires thorough consideration and domain expertise.

Providing feedback on these controls and capabilities is one of the most important roles the Microsoft MVP community plays. Our Microsoft MVPs are individuals who have mastered our technology. Beyond technical depth and expertise, they are a trusted connection point and a voice that carries with it untold amounts of customer conversations, whiteboarding sessions, and detailed explanations. Leaders in the community like Tony Redmond, Paul Robichaux, Brian Reid, Stle Hansen, Jussi Roine, Juan Carlos Gonzlez Martn , Gustavo Valez, Vasil Michev, and others provide an unbiased and often critical feedback loop to help ensure Microsoft delivers the best experience for IT. This goes beyond simply instrumenting new capabilities. Instead, they help us be more customer-centric, thinking through each capability to better understand how new controls are experienced by users and how they land in the admin centers of Office 365, in Azure, or in our APIs and scripted PowerShell implementations.

The team who created this book is an important part of our engineering and quality process. The content within these pages has been curated by technology experts who have been partners with Microsoft on our Office 365 engineering efforts. This book embodies the outside voice and an independent view that comes from years of real world, IT-driven experiences. It is also a great example of the spirit of Office 365 a team from a diverse set of backgrounds, experiences, and geographical locations creating a living document to share their knowledge.

Rajesh Jha

Corporate Vice President, Office 365, Microsoft Corporation

Introduction

Welcome to the Fifth edition of Office 365 for IT Professionals, a guide to Office 365, Microsofts cloud office applications platform for those who are already experienced administrators of on-premises deployments.

This eBook contains information to help administrators understand and exploit Office 365. This is not an official Microsoft publication and none of the opinions expressed here are endorsed by Microsoft in any way. Instead, its a collection of thoughts, ideas, and perspectives from a team of highly experienced Office 365 MVPs (members of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program).

The book was originally titled Office 365 for Exchange Professionals and we published two editions under that title (which accounts for some of the examples that youll find in the text). Although Exchange was the first application many organizations moved to the cloud, it is obvious that anyone who approaches Office 365 from the perspective of a single application and remains focused on that application runs a large risk of losing much of the advantage from their investment. With that thought in mind, theres lots to talk about concerning SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Stream, Teams, Planner, Microsoft Planner, Delve, MyAnalytics, and Yammer, all of which are covered here.

Organization of this book

The intent of this book is to help those who run Office 365 tenants take maximum advantage of the platform. The topics include:

• Introducing Office 365.
• Why making the decision to move into the cloud is not such a big deal after all!
• How the basic workloads run and the differences between the on-premises products and their cloud counterparts.
• How Office 365 Identities work including directory synchronization and single sign-on.
• How to manage Office 365.
• How to manage Exchange Online mailboxes and other mail-enabled recipients.
• How Office 365 Groups work.
• How Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Teams build on top of Groups to enable task-based planning and team-based collaboration.
• How messages flow within Office 365 and how to protect users against spam and other mail-transmitted nasties.
• How to manage the various clients that can connect to Office 365.
• How to use the Office 365 Data Governance framework to keep important data or remove data that you no longer need using Office 365 labels and retention policies.