You got an overview of Office 365 administration in the last lesson. Originally, I was going to introduce you to all the admin centers in lesson 7, but in all honesty, putting them all in one lesson just got too be too long. So, I’ve broken it up over the next 6 lessons. In this first one, we’re going to start by look at the Exchange Admin Center. Even breaking up the admin centers into 6 different lessons, there is simply too much in each admin center to cover to dive into the details, but this will give you a good overview of what you should be aware of and what you should look at. So, without further ado, let’s get going.

Exchange Online

If you’re familiar with Microsoft products, you know exactly what this is, it’s where you manage your email. If you aren’t familiar, now you know what it is 🙂 This is where all things related to your email hosting are configured. This includes mailboxes, contact lists, exchange admin security, compliance settings, malware and spa settings, mobile email management, mail rules, and hybrid email management to name a few. There is a lot in there! If you’ve managed an Exchange server before, this will actually look pretty familiar to you. If you haven’t, while the links are labeled well, there is a lot in there. Definitely, take some time to learn where everything is. If you’re just getting started, I’ll call out a few you’ll want to look at right away.

  • mailboxes: This is where you manage your various users’ email boxes. You can configure email address here, enable/disable web-based access and syncing to a mail client. You can also configure a users email archiver here. If you open up a suer you can also configure various features on the mailbox, permissions for the mailbox as well as contact info.
  • everything under protection: Microsoft does a pretty good job of filtering out spam and malware with their out of the box settings. However, if you want to tweak your spam rules, or maybe set spam and malware to go to a quarantine rather than the users’ junk mail, this is handled in the protection section.
  • rules: Have you ever seen emails that have a disclaim at the bottom? i.e. If you’re not the intended recipient… or this email may contain sensitive information… This is where you can configure rules such as applying a disclaimer to all outgoing emails. You can also do things like automatically apply rights protection, filter messages based on certain criteria (file attachments, size, etc). These rules can be very powerful and very handy. I definitely recommend you check them out.

As I said, there are a lot more settings in there, often times their importance is based on the type of work you do and how you use email. But, this will at least get you started.

Conclusion

Hopefully, that gives you a good overview of administrative components associated with Exchange Online and what you should be aware of. If you’re interested in learning more, sign up for early access to the paid membership section of my Office 365 admin Portal and as I build out the content, there will be a lot more detail about each of the admin centers and how to configure settings in all of them as well as keep you up-to-date on new administration aspects of Office 365.