Office 365: Management Challenges
Migrating to Microsoft Office 365 seems simple at first glance. But at some point, the question inevitably arises: How do we efficiently manage licenses, user accounts, access rights, and mailboxes? This point is not infrequently underestimated. Our analysis reveals the biggest challenges in Office 365 management and gives tips on how they can be overcome.
Challenge 1: User and License Management
User and license management is a time-consuming endeavor. New employees, role changes, or terminations regularly require new assignments, changes, or deactivations of accounts and licenses.
The challenge: Where many work manually and without clear responsibilities, errors creep in, but the pressure is high. On the one hand, employees expect quick access to the necessary applications and rights. On the other hand, compliance requirements demand correct and quick offboarding of accounts. To add to this, a single poorly managed, undeactivated license can quickly become a security risk.
Tip: Even if the task might seem easy at first, in most companies it's worth investing in a clean concept with defined responsibilities. Where the volume of daily changes is high, the use of software for the administration of accounts and licenses pays off.
Challenge 2: Mailbox and Permission Management
For many organizations, mailboxes are an essential part of daily work. Typically, users have an individual mailbox, but shared mailboxes, often for a department, a team, or a special purpose, are also common.
The challenge: The number of access requests quickly grows over time. Those responsible for managing the mailboxes often do not have direct visibility into whether the requesting user should have access and to what extent. Processing takes time and quickly becomes an "annoying routine task".
Tip: It's worth assigning ownership responsibilities for access and permissions: a mailbox owner can make decisions faster, which significantly speeds up the processing of access requests. If the number of tickets is particularly high, it pays to consider software-supported request workflows. With these, rights can be assigned, for example, after approval by the mailbox owner – in the best case, completely automated.
Challenge 3: Updates and Audits
After initial deployment and the first weeks of operation, organizational routine sets in. This should not mean, however, that Office 365 environments run completely unobserved.
The challenge: Even if the cloud platform handles much of the work and takes over updates, it does not release the operators from the need to keep an eye on their own environment. Microsoft regularly announces changes. Whether and when these changes affect their own environment is not immediately visible: changes are announced with preliminary notice of a few weeks, but the actual schedule of new features often depends on the activated update ring.
Tip: Reviewing your own Office 365 environment should happen regularly. Users at the boundaries are often the best audience to get feedback on their perception of updates and changes: if problems arise, for example, due to deprecated options, they are often the first ones to notice. But it's better to anticipate problems before they become public. It pays to plan time for proactive testing.
Conclusion: Automation Can Help
Even if management seems simple at first glance, you should not underestimate the effort involved in managing Office 365 environments. Regardless of how well the organization is structured, certain tasks will regularly need to be performed, and certain tasks are simply error-prone. It's worth checking where automation could make sense, for example, regarding user onboarding and offboarding, access and permission management, and reporting and auditing.