 Hi, my name is Sandra Betakis and I'm going to be your instructor for this course. I have spent years working with Microsoft Technologies going way back to DOS before we ever had the hopes of Windows and certainly before we ever had hopes of working through technologies like Office 365 and SharePoint sites. With this experience in seeing all of the technologies grow and not just grow but grow together, we're now at a point where all of the experience of working through Word and Excel in PowerPoint and online apps can be brought together. In my professional career, I don't just stand here and teach it, I can honestly tell you that I deploy all of these technologies to all my customers and I spend a lot of time not only creating content but migrating them over, importing all the data in and then giving it some sort of workable form to send them forward. So it is my pleasure to take not only my favorite programs and share them with you but to also share some great ideas that I found along the way. In this module, we start by learning about Office 365 administration. When you talk about Office 365 administration, it's not just someone setting things up, meaning a user or a password, but we actually have to look at email from a higher perspective. We have to look at our domains from a higher perspective. So if you own a domain, yourcompany.com, and you now want email addresses so you could be Sandra at sanderclassroom.com or Doreen at sanderclassroom.com, then you have to start looking at maybe some new key terms and how to manage the domain itself, how to make sure you own it and how to transfer it into Office 365 to make it part of the environment. In this module, we'll go through all of those steps and learn some key terms that will get you there if this happens to be a whole new world. We'll also get a chance once we've discussed domains to talk about licensing and licensing on who has what type of license as well as how to share with other networks that aren't part of your Office 365 organization. Part of the administration is also controlling who can do what, who can use which software package that has a lot to do with licensing and has a lot to do with administrative access. So we'll make sure at the end of this you understand domains, administrative policies, licensing and how to make sure the users have what they need. There's a couple of key terms that are important to be familiar with. If you're new to administrating any sort of network, these might all be brand new. The first term I want to go over is the term domain name. The domain name is what we call a base URL for email correspondence and websites. So let's think about a website. We'll go to sanderclassroom.com an example. Sanderclassroom.com is in fact a domain name. Now what people do with domain names is they append something like www to get to a website or an email address which is their alias little at symbol and then the rest of the domain name. So in the term of an email address of course it would be Sandra at sandernetwork.com. So the domain name is the first step in understanding what needs to be brought into Office 365. Now when you first open up your account, whether you're on a demo or you've actually paid for a subscription and some licenses, Microsoft allows you to get a starter domain. You get to pick the very first portion of it. So if it was Sanderclassroom, I might pick that or maybe I would abbreviate it and they append to the end of it.onmicrosoft.com. So you can actually start with that, get the licensing done, get all of the users imported or typed up, whatever it is you need to do and we'll go through all of that throughout this course. And then at the end you can bring your domain in and flip everything to change their name to, in my case, sanderclassroom.com. So the domain name is important. If you have one you can use it. When you first open your account in 365 you'll have something.onmicrosoft.com and it will work just fine. It's going to be up to you to bring the other one in and switch everything over. Another term is register. Now if you don't have a domain and this whole process is brand new to you, it's a registrar that you actually buy it from. Now I use the term buy very, very loosely. It's what you're going to see on all the websites. You don't actually own it. I call it a bad lease program because when you register a domain name, actually you own it, you pay to own it. You pay to own it yearly and as soon as you stop paying that yearly fee, they're going to take it away from you. So I guess it's not real ownership. You own it as long as you pay for it. There are a lot of different companies out there that claim to be registrars. Some of the top big ones are Network Solutions and GoDaddy. I use those quite a bit just because I find them very stable and predictable. There's a lot of smaller ones. Everyone can sell a domain name these days, but I am always very, very careful. Even though they're super cheap, you don't always know who's behind it and there's a lot of selling and reselling of those services, so you might have some time chasing it after a while. So you go to a registrar, like Network Solutions, like GoDaddy. Microsoft will actually sell you one now too, so they can claim to be a registrar. And then you purchase the domain name. You set up what is called who is information. That's the contact information to the account holder. Who owns it? How long are you going to buy it for? You can buy it for a year. You can buy it for 50 years. It's all up to you. And again, it will expire. You have to make sure to renew it, or it does in fact go away. Now, another term that we need to be familiar with that you'll hear quite often is DNS. So you've gone to a registrar. You've bought a domain name. You own it. Again, we'll just keep using the same example, but now you have to tell the world how to find your website and how to find your email. So you use a service called DNS, which is technically domain name server. And it's a server that basically tracks where your domain and the services are. And it maps it out. So if you're hosting a website with one company, then you're going to put in DNS, www, and then follow it up with an IP address of where to go find it. And it's the same thing for mail. If you're going to use an email address of user at, then you have to put something in called an MX record. So it tells the Internet when someone is sending mail to sandroclassroom.com, forward all that mail over to Microsoft Office 365 because that's where the mailboxes are. So DNS handles all of that in the background for us. So we have this on microsoft.com domain. It sometimes can be confusing. I think they tried to oversimplify and they haven't done it any justice. But the bottom line is when you open up your Microsoft 365 account, you may or may not have intentions of bringing over your real domain name. But regardless, you have to have a login to start with. So I can't log in with my real domain name if it's not over there on the platform yet. So the initial domains use this. And then you get to choose what the beginning of that is going to be. Now if it's taken, they're going to obviously tell you that it's taken and you're going to have to try again. So an example, if I'm going to use Mayfield Corner, I would put mayfieldcorner.onmicrosoft.com. What you call this prefix is entirely up to you. You could call it Charlie if that's what you wanted to call. But because I know that maybe this account was for Mayfield Corner LLC, I'm going to try to come up with that initial prefix that sounds something like where I'm going when I'm done. Once you've got all the setup steps done, you get to actually choose which domain to use. So you'll see here we have choose a domain, select a domain you want to use for your email addresses because that's what really it's all about. Do you want to use mayfieldcorner.onmicrosoft.com or do you want to use your own domain? So in this case, let's assume that I own Mayfield Corner. So now you would have this domain with. Now, when we say use your own domain, there are some steps to prove it's yours. There are some DNS entries that have to be made, but this will help you flip everything you have, including the user accounts and their email addresses over. There are very basic steps on how to host a domain name. So if you don't own one already, find a registrar. If you don't have a registrar of choice, meaning I happen to do this for a living, so I can tell you who my favorites are, I will say that Office 365 has that little print in the wizard that says you don't own a domain one, buy it now. So everyone is going to be very happy to sell you that name. Again, these just happen to be the ones that I use on a regular basis. There's no preference, you can pick your own. We then log on to Office 365 with that initial administrative account that was determined. So if I picked mayfieldcorner.onmicrosoft.com, it asked for an initial username. I usually pick admin, so maybe it's admin at mayfieldcorner.onmicrosoft.com. That's going to be my administrator account. I set it up when I started it. So once you log on as administrator, you go to Domains, you click on Add a Domain. It literally details out step by step and what it needs. What I really like about it is when it looks up the domain, if you've already owned it, it'll figure out where it's registered and it will give you directions specific to that register. It's going to have you put in what's called a text entry. Text entries do have value in DNS. There are certain reasons where I would use text entries, but in this particular case, it's literally a false record that does absolutely no harm and the only service it proves is the identity of who owns it. So if I have access to DNS and I can put that one record in, it's going to search for it and say, oh, good, they've got the credentials they need. So once we follow all the steps, we add our text entry, it is then going to tell us what are their DNS entries. So let's say everything I own is at Network Solutions. It's going to say you need these DNS entries for Microsoft Office 365 to work and you're going to go over there to that register and you're going to do a little bit of data entry. And you'll see here basic steps to host it. When you're setting it up, which domain do you want to use? Enter a domain you already own, for example, yourcompany.com. Once we've dealt with the domain, we can start adding our users. Within the Office 365 courseware, there's a lot about adding users. So if you have one or two, it's as simple as add user and putting it in. Maybe you have 500 users. So out of 500 users, maybe you want to do a big import. However you do it, you want to get them in there and you also want to assign the licenses. You have to buy the licenses. Now, I can tell you that Microsoft has small business licenses, enterprise licenses. There's a lot of stuff in there. Hopefully before this point, you already know what you want and you've already purchased them. If not, you want to go up and make some decisions and make sure to bring out all the features because every single license comes with certain features that the other license may not. You want to set a domain purpose. Usually you'll see just email. And again, we've got DNS to point to Office 365. Licenses can be mixed and matched. So right here, what I see in a licensing console is they're interested in using the CRM professional. We're interested in using Power BI. We have Office 365 Enterprise E3. E3 is the level of license. And then you have Project Online with Project Pro for Office 365. You'll see I've got 25 valid of each. None of them have expired and we've actually assigned all 25. So if I'm now to bring on a 26th user, I know that I need to go through the administrative console, through billing, through licenses, and I need to add them. As an administrator, one of the choices that you need to make is a limit on data sharing. Now, I usually associate Office 365 with email because that's what it's used for the most. With that being said, there's a lot more behind the scenes. We have SharePoint, we have OneDrive, Skype for Business, which is instant messaging and video conferencing. And they can all reach out to external recipients. So you need to make a decision right up front on whether or not you want users to be able to share this data externally. Do you want them to be able to access your sites? Do you want people in your organization to be able to share their calendar by using a public URL? Do we want people in our organization to use Skype for Business to contact people in other organizations? And for just an FYI, if you've heard the term link, Office 365 was always using link as instant messaging and conferencing, and they are now most recently Skype for Business. So that's actually the old name if you're looking for it. And we also have integrated apps. So you can add 30-party apps into Office 365. You get to choose whether or not you want them to communicate. Integrated apps can come from your own organization. It could even be third-party. In fact, there's a little icon for the Microsoft Store. You can go out and buy an app that looks fun, that'll make your life easier. But when you install those apps, there's always going to be some permissions. We have to have set levels of access. What are the users going to be able to do and who's going to be the administrator of that app? So when you have the integrated apps, you want to make sure that you've got a plan going into it. If someone is invited to use that app, it'll send that invitation in email. So here's an example. We have a third-party app that I found, and you'll see this is Margie's Travel, and it's an Alpine ski house. And when you bring it on, it needs your permission to sign you in, read your profile, edit, delete your files, read the items in your site collections, which is SharePoint. Speak, if that is a new technology to you, and it sends mail as you. It tells you how you're signed in, and you have to tell it okay or no thanks. So this is just an example of a random app, but this is a very common example of what it might ask you. Sway is a brand new application that comes in with Office 365. By default, it is enabled for everyone. It is a fantastic application. In fact, if you take all the 365 courses, we will spend some time with it, and it is fun. So with Sway, it's a good example of another application. You get to either enable it or disable it on a per-user basis, and if you disable it, it doesn't remove it from the Office 365 app picker or the home page. It just means a user can't use it. How you use Sway is you sign into Office 365, you go to the Admin Center, and in the Admin Center, there's something called Service Settings, and under Service Settings, you have the ability to enable it or disable it. A big part of what we do as an administrator is not only the setup, but controlling the user's software. So we get to choose which software your users can download and install directly from Office 365. Do we want to put Microsoft Office and Skype for Business? Do we want them to be able to install Project? Or do we want them to be able to install SharePoint Designer? All you have to do is add and remove one of the checkmarks. Now, Microsoft Office, we don't get to pick which. It comes in every single application. Skype for Business installs separately when you're doing the installation so you can choose one or the other. Microsoft Project is another one, and then SharePoint Designer, a lot of people ask me questions on if you have someone who's going to be writing a whole lot of SharePoint sites and trying to customize them. It's another level of software that helps us do that. Then you go through advanced installation, and these are for administrators that may have a little bit of experience installing software. You will see that there's something called the deployment tool click to run that you can download as an administrator. So if you want to take all of this away and you want to decide how it gets installed, if you are an advanced administrator, you are used to writing installation scripts. You can download this and it really allows an administrator to customize and manage the Office 2003 installation, what's going to be installed and how it's going to be installed. Power BI is another very important tool that's been added into the Office 365 console. It's a way to run reports and query external data. So like any other program within Office 365, if you're going to use Power BI, there is an admin center dedicated directly for it. How to set up the environment, what types of data will be accessible via the cloud, you get your settings, data feeds, and the users and groups are going to participate in this level of reporting. Power BI and its particular features are outside of the realm of this course. In fact, it would have to be an independent course on its own. So understand that, but if you are going to use it and you're trying to figure out from the administrative level where you're going to go to set it up, you're going to need to have an admin in the admin center. Bing Places for Business has also been included, so what you want to do is you want to get a chance to make sure your business is on the map and that people can find you. If you go to the Office 365 admin center, you will see Under Admin, Bing Places for Business, it will find the company name and address that you specified when you started this subscription. This is the address you're trying to put in there, but that's where it's going to show up. So I happen to be on a Microsoft demo file, so it's giving the Microsoft way in Redmond, automatically it finds it, it locates it, it wants you to know if that's the business, and then you hit submit to say yes. Now, just to prevent people from registering businesses that don't exist, if your business is not registered, there will be two or three other steps that it will ask you to confirm on the map. There's a lot of services behind the scenes that Office 365 allows you to manage. So if you go through the admin center and you look at service settings, you will see that there's items for protection, for mail flow, for auditing, there's a lot of them in here. Now the scope of this course is to get you introduced to the administrative features, but there's a lot of features that are in fact outside of the scope of course of mail, administration, or SharePoint web design, in example. However, at any and all levels you want to make sure you know how it's treating anti-malware or your spam filters. We have outbound spam policies, so are you going to let someone internally email 500 people from Outlook? What if they have a virus that's emailing out? So you want to spend some time poking around in there and seeing that you can create some settings that work. Office 365 does have a fantastic help system, so if you're in there and you have a question what the policies are asking you once you start editing, then their help staff is always going to walk you through the right settings. We do have mail flow. This is almost outside of the scope of this class, but if you want you can certainly take a look. You can write some custom mail rules on how to process incoming and outgoing mail. A good example would be a disclaimer that's going to be appended to the bottom of every single person's email as it leaves the building. You know, email disclaimer, this is intended for the recipient of the email only, please, and you've got all the legal speaks, so that's really where that type of stuff goes. If you want to track changes to who's doing what, we've got some auditing features in there, and notice this is just your mail settings. We have service settings just like this for SharePoint sites, for Skype, that's going to handle, for Sway, user software, your password policy for the entire organization, Microsoft Project, Dynamic CRM, and then you have community rights management in mobile. There's some great settings in there, so you have to spend some time going through each one and finding what is going to be important to you. The administrative console also has a lot with reports. Reports are great. It's just going to tell you what's going on. You don't have to work too hard for it. So if you follow through reports, you're going to see, again, we have multiple categories of reports. You could spend all day seeing what kind of things to report on. I happen to pull out mail because, again, this is the most common. What's active and inactive? You know, the person that demanded a Office 365 address and never used it. What's the usage going to be? What about newer deleted mailboxes? And the same thing with groups. So there's some good reports in there if you're trying to dig for information. Office 365, like anything else, has its good days and has its bad days. 99.9% of the days are very, very good, but if you think by chance there's something that seems off, maybe it's a little slow to respond, maybe you're getting an error where you least expect it, you want to go and check in Service Health in the admin console. This might be a shot of about a week's worth of data. The green check marks, the easy one, it means all is good, but there might be an information. This might be a new resolve. This arrow is pointing up. It might be that it's restoring service so something might have gone wrong and they're fixing it and it's coming back up. So there is going to be a legend at the bottom of this page, just not enough room for the screenshot, but you'll be able to tell pretty quickly if you need to log a service request or to see what the status of your service request is, then what you have to do is you go through the Support tab in the Admin Center and what I really like is it does give you some top issues. You might find that your issue is right there. These, you'll see like Unlicensed Product or this particular error in Office 2013. That might mean that that's pretty high up in the realm of what people are calling in for. So there's your top issues. There's some guided walk-throughs right here in the Help Center, but then you have Contact Support. As soon as you click on Service Request, the first thing it's going to ask you is what type of issue and any surrounding information it can find to support the issue and it will do one of two things. If it thinks it can find the answer through the Knowledge Base, it'll present you that with a potential answer but also let you move forward as well anyways. If you've already put in a Service Request, you can click on this link and see what the status of it is. So as you're checking and logging the Service Requests, here's our Create New Service Request. It's going to have you put it in a category. Is it about billing? Is it about mail? Is it about SharePoint sites? Most importantly, it's going to get you to the right team because an administrator that can help you with an email problem is going to be different than an administrator that's specific. So you create a request, you pick your category and again, if there's an issue detected if you move forward it might remind you we're having issues with Power BI do you still want to support a request? So they're going to walk you through it and try to give you as much information as possible.