■ Are You an Administrator?

IN THIS CHAPTER:

■ Are You an Administrator?

■ An Overview of Your Administrative Tasks

■ First Things First: Key Tasks to Complete ■ Adding and Managing Office 365 Users

■ Viewing Domain Properties ■ Setting Up and Managing

Outlook and Exchange ■ Setting Up SharePoint Online ■ Configuring Lync Online ■ Managing Your Subscriptions ■ Getting Help with Office 365 ■ What’s Next

CHAPTER 3

Administering an Office 365 Account

IT CAN BE LONELY at the top. If you’re the person responsible for setting up or at least managing the Office 365 account, you have a whole set of tasks and decisions to make that will affect the way your team interacts in the space. But don’t worry—the choices are pretty simple, and they’re easy to change later if necessary. And what’s more, there’s a community of administrators (and Microsoft MVPs) who are waiting in the wings to answer your questions if you get stuck along the way. Nice! As you think through the way you want your team to interact in the cloud, you’ll need to make decisions about who will have access (and what kind of access they will have), which services you want to use, how you want to manage your email, and how the various services will be set up to work for your team. This chapter walks you through all those choices and more so that when it’s time to get everybody moving, you can hit the cloud running.

Are You an Administrator?

Administrator is an important-sounding word, and what it really means is this: you get to make decisions about your Office 365 account and get things set up the way you want them. With that glory comes responsibility, and this chapter will help you determine

which items are important for your group and which are not. Specifically, you are an administrator if

■ You are creating and managing the account. ■ It is up to you to add and manage users in the site. ■ You assign and administer the different licenses your teammates use in Office 365. (I’ll say more about that in a minute.) ■ You are charged with setting up the various services the way you want them. ■ You have been charged with a specific goal you’ll be helping your group to achieve.

■ You are the visionary behind the whole virtual team plan, and you want to see it work.

■ You’ll be designing, updating, and managing the SharePoint team site in your account.

You might be taking on one or more of those tasks—or perhaps your role is bigger or smaller. No matter—in Office 365, you can have more than one administrator, so if you want to share the wealth of features all the better. Just to keep things simple, though, it’s generally a good idea to have one person in charge of things such as user accounts, permissions, and licenses. And if you have more than one administrator in the site, be sure you communicate about big-picture decisions such as whether you want to migrate email accounts so that other accounts combine with Office 365 mail or whether you want to allow members to include external contacts in Lync Online. Orchestrating those types of management choices helps you not duplicate—or undo—each other’s efforts.

Tip This is a philosophical consideration, but one great benefit of being an administrator is that you can think through the kind of team experience you want your members to have. How collaborative will it be? What types of projects will you be working on? What, ultimately, will a successful group look like? Thinking through those questions will help you make choices consistent with that vision when you set up the services in Office 365.