Intelligink (Office 365 Admin Toolbox) Membership Site Updates

If you don’t’ care about this, just skip down to the next section to get the news 🙂

I’ve struggled with how to actually name this. It’s a membership site from my company Intelligink, but I honestly don’t want it branded as my companies site or my companies offering. I want to it to be a site you can go to access tools that will help you as an Office 365 Administrator. So, from here on out, think of it as your Office 365 Admin Toolbox even though it will remain a subsite of Intelligink, it will be referred to as the Office 365 Admin Toolbox. In fact, to that end, there are two new URLs you can use to go directly to the site:
– https://office365admintoolbox.com
– https://office365toolbox.io

Either of these two URLs will take you straight to the membership homepage where you can sign in (upper right corner) if you’re already a member or register to become a member if you’re not.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way. One big update I made to the site this past month, we have Videos!

Just a couple of them for now, but it’s a start. You can now view a recorded talk I have at the Collab365 global conference last year as well as the recording of last months webinar.

I plan to continue to provide these free videos as I do more webinars and record future presentations.

As always, if you have any feedback on this aspect of the site or things you would like to see, I would love to hear from you! Just reply to this email or send me an email [email protected]

Ok, on to the news from this past month.

Office 365 News from August

There was actually quite a bit of news this last month I want to talk about, again, I’ll provide my thoughts on the ones I consider to be the biggest/most impactful, but this month I’ll also include links to some additional announcements you may still want to check out. It was really hard to pick and choose what to talk about and I’m sure it will be next month as well.

Microsoft 365 Deleting Users Wizard

First, if you want to read about this one, here is the announcement article from Microsoft on this one. Personally, I really like this. Once different from typical on-premises world to the online world is how you handle employees that have left the company. Online, once they leave, you want to reclaim the license to use for someone else or at a minimum stop paying for it. With Office 365, if you do this, 30 days later the mailbox will be deleted. In order to retain the email and reclaim the license, you need at Archive licenses or to convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox. Easy if your familiar with Exchange, maybe not if you’re a small company, and maybe don’t have the same level of Exchange admin expertise in-house (which a lot of Office 365 subscribers are).

Enter the guided workflow for deleting Office 365 users.

This is a new process introduced to guide you through the steps you should be taking when deleting an Office 365 user.
1. What to do with the users’ licenses, remove them or keep them
2. Assign someone access to the users OneDrive for Business. This makes sure someone can look at the files and be sure to save anything of importance (as these will all be deleted in 30 days as well when unassigned a license)
3. Grant access to the users mailbox AND convert it to a shared mailbox. This ensures the mailbox and access to the mailbox will remain indefinitely rather than the 30 days it would stick around if the users were just deleted.

Again, I think this is a great new feature added to Office 365 to ensure proper steps are taken when a user is deleted from Office 365.

All that said, there are some glitches and gotcha’s that you should still be a way of. Tony Redmond has a great article here on what to watch out for when walking through the process

Microsoft 365 is the smartest place to store your content

Don’t let the title of this article deceive you (it did me at first). This isn’t talking about all the reason why you should store your content in Office 365. Or why storing your content in Office 365 is the “smart” decision to make. It talks all about the AI and “Smart” features of Office 365 that you can benefit from by storing your content in Office 365.

So what “intelligent” features have come to Office 365 recently to enhance your content. There are features around leveraging services in Azure to transcribe, recognize, and index videos, photos, and images to assist in searching of these media types.

There are also file intelligence features that will help you intelligently discover content stored in SharePoint Online that is relevant to you on a daily basis as well as key information within the document.

There are a lot more intelligent features coming to Office 365 so I would really recommend reading the article about what’s coming.

This is one of the reasons I like Office 365 and the cloud as well. The complexities of doing something like this and the amount of computing power necessary means we’ll probably never see this on-prem. However, with the “unlimited” resources in the cloud, these scenarios can become a reality and hopefully better empower us to work smarter with the content stored in Office 365.

Privileged Access Management in Office 365

This feature alone is a reason you should go get an E5 license for at least your admins This allows your admins to have “normal” accounts for their daily work, but then when they need to elevate to admin rights, they can request that admin right, go through an approval process, and receive admin rights for a set period of time. This is a must for you admins in my opinion! It not only protects them from themselves but protects their account if it’s compromised.

Now you don’t inherently have admin rights with any given account as soon as you log in. Don’t give your users an “admin” account and a “normal” account in Office 365 like a lot of you did in the on-premises world. In Office 365 it’s better (and actually cheaper) to pay for an E5 license for your admins and enable PAM for it.

Microsoft Stream is now available for your organization

YES!!! With Office 365 Video going away, and Stream becoming the new solution going forward, this pretty much was a must. This is bringing Microsoft Stream to the Office 365 Business Plans. If you need to store videos for you organization or want a place to host internal training videos or recordings of meetings, you definitely want to check out Stream. Even more so if you’re on a Business Plan and didn’t have access to it previously.

There wasn’t must of a formal blog post around this, just an update to the Office 365 roadmap, Feature ID: 33019 if you want to go look it up.

My Analytics Nudges in Outlook

This could also go under the AI topic for Office 365 content earlier. This is AI for your email via MyAnalytics. It’s just a little notification within Outlook helping you with your email.

Things like reminders where you may have said you would do something via email. It will list all the emails where you said thing like “I’ll email that do you” or “Let me put that together for you” or “I’ll send over a meeting invite” It will show a list of those types of emails you maybe never responded to, and ask you if you’ve actually done it.

I’ve been playing around with this a little bit, and it’s already helped me catch things that I’ve promised via email and forgotten to follow up on. Another one of those seeming small AI features that can help you with your day to day work.

There are a few other nudges that you’ll see as well and I’m excited to see what other nudges will start popping up in Outlook to help me in my day to day work.

Notable Mentions

Other FREE Learning Resources

Webinar – “The top 5 things to consider when getting started with Office 365”

Are you looking to roll out Office 365 to your organization or are you new to Office 365? Have you already rolled it out and want to make sure you got off on the right foot? In this 30 minute webinar, we’ll look at the 5 most important aspects of standing up and deploying an Office 365 tenant. If you don’t do these right the first time, you may live to regret it! We’ll spend this webinar looking at these 5 topics, what you should do, what you shouldn’t do, and steps you can take to assist you in creating an Office 365 environment you can be proud of!

The “Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast” at Microsoft Ignite!

Ok, technically, getting into Microsoft Ignite definitely is NOT free. However, if you are there, find Scott or I to get a sticker or some other swag is most definitely free. As well as coming to watch us do a live show at the conference. If you’re going to be there, I would love to say hi and provide you with some amazing swag (ok…it’s really just some stickers). Or, if you have a chance, come check out our live show (POD1014 in the session builder)!

Podcast – “Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast”

If you aren’t familiar with it, a friend (Scott Hoag) and I also have a weekly podcast all about the Microsoft Cloud (a lot of Office 365, a little Azure).  If you’re interested in checking that out, you can find the podcast in your favorite podcatcher app or by visiting https://www.msclouditpropodcast.com/

Collab365 Community

Another great community with a ton of free content! Scott and I post our podcast over there and I know the people that run the site. It’s a great group of people that hang out over there that really do an outstanding job of pulling a LOT of free content together for your consumption to learn about all kinds of topics around Office 365. If you haven’t checked them, you should definitely take a look – https://collab365.community/