GOBINDER SAINI: Hello everyone, welcome
to the multi-tenant administration session
for service health and message center.
I'm Gobinder Saini and I'm a PM
on the M365 admin center team.
I'm responsible for building service health
and message center experiences
that bring to you service communications.
Today, I'm going to talk about the
experiences we are building
for our admins who manage multiple tenants,
who I will be referring to as multi-tenant admins
for the rest of the session.
I will talk about, why are we investing
in multi-tenant administration
and why service communication experiences.
I will also demonstrate our brand spanking new,
multi-tenant administration experience for service health,
and also talk about our ideas on building similar experience
for message center,
where you can manage your change notifications.
Okay, so let's start at multi-tenant administration
and service communications what does it really mean for you?
First question I'm going to try
and answer is why a multi-tenant management.
So if you are a frequent user of service health
and message center in Microsoft 365 admin center,
you are accustomed to consuming and actioning
on our service health communications
in the context of a single tenant.
In our research and data analysis we identified
that almost one third of the tenants,
administered using Microsoft tools
for admin center are actually managed
by admins who administer multiple tenants.
So who are these tenants or who are these admins?
These are the admins technicians off our Microsoft partners,
who sell services on behalf of Microsoft
and who are essentially cloud solution providers,
also known as CSPs or managed service providers, MSPs.
They basically manage tenants on behalf of the customers
and hence they are always requiring the need
to manage multiple tenants at the same time.
These are also admins
of organizations who have multiple tenants,
and the reason they have multiple tenants is
because it could be a result of a merger or an acquisition.
It's because the company maintains multiple tenants
to support their testing environments,
for example, dev test pre production
or it could be because the organization has
to maintain separate tenants for each of the companies
or subsidiaries due to various state regulations.
So we dug into all the wonderful feedback
that we have gathered from you or various channels,
and also spoke to many multi-tenanted admins
about your business needs.
And here are some of the key challenges that we learned
that are faced by admins day in and day out.
Starting with the biggest challenge of logging into
or switching between different tenants,
since our admin center is designed to support the context
of a single tenant.
In addition, the lack of aggregated views to monitor
and track status, our services across tenants,
forces them in a reactive mode rather than a proactive mode,
and also not able to take any actions
across managed tenants are some
of the major issues impacting them.
So let's talk about how are we going
about addressing these issues since our goal is
to provide unified experience
across tenants without having to juggle between.
Earlier this year, my colleagues in the M365
for admin center brought to you the ability
to switch tenants via a tenant picker in the admin center.
So if you're a partner,
you don't have to go back to the partner center to log back
into another client tenant anymore.
We have got great reviews on how helpful this is,
and I'm super glad that this has been beneficial,
which is great, however,
you're still working in the context of a single tenant,
which is still a challenge.
So the same team who brought you the tenant switcher
is now building on that feature set and bringing
to you the ability to view
and manage multiple tenants at the same time.
So no need to open multiple sessions
of admin center in separate browsers or in private mode.
The all tenants view provides a snapshot of insights
for service health, support requests, product,
billing information, licensing, number of active users,
and your role on the tenant,
and this is across all the tenants that you manage.
This view is being rolled out as we speak,
so be on the lookout.
I also encourage you to learn more
about the overall multi-tenant management roadmap
in my colleague team session titled multi-tenant management
in Microsoft 365 admin center.
So let's go deeper into service communications.
The feedback from the customers has been loud and clear
to us that service related comms are extremely important
to multi-tenant admins.
This helps them to provide quality support to the end users
and also to manage service changes,
make sure that users are aware of all the changes
that are coming in and the new features
that are rolling out.
So right on the heels of the all tenants view,
we've also allowed the ability to use service communications
across all your tenants.
We have prioritized the shipping of service health
over message center and this is again a direct result
of the customer input that we have got.
I must add that your feedback
and partnership has been instrumental in designing
and building this functionality.
So before I get to the demo, a quick request,
it would be great if you can continue sharing
your experiences by responding to a few questions here.
As I mentioned, this is super helpful
to us as we build out new features
and helps us to prioritize as well.
We have Microsoft survey link available for you
to answer a few questions about your experience,
and we also have a customer panel available
that you can join.
Once you are on this panel,
we will invite you to participate in our usability studies
and to co-design experiences.
And outside of this, please do feel free to reach out
to us at the below mentioned email address
to provide any feedback
or ask any questions regarding service health,
or the message center experiences.
As I mentioned earlier,
we will be bringing aggregated service health to use first,
which is targeted to improve the quality of support
that you offer to your users.
One of our main goals is to help you become proactive
in servicing your customers by drawing actionable insights
across your tenants instead of being reactive
and relying on notifications.
So let's get into the demo
to learn more about this experience.
Let's start the demo with the admin center.
If you're an admin who manages multiple tenants,
when you log into M365 admin center,
you will now be greeted to the tenants switcher.
The tenant switcher helps you to log into the context of any
of your manage tenants or switch contexts from one tenant
to another without having to manually sign in and sign out.
What's new here is the option to log
into the context of all tenants
by clicking on either the view insights
across all your tenants which is at the bottom
of your page of the tenants switcher,
or you can log into the all tenants
by clicking all the all tenants link here
on the top of the left hand navigation bar.
This helps you land on the all tenants view.
So let's go ahead and click on it.
Okay.
Building the service health.
All right, there it is.
So the all tenants view gives you a glimpse
of all your managed tenants and gets a quick view
into your service health, support requests,
products and billing status.
This is what I call, your start your day view
to understand what's going on with your tenants.
You can expand the rules to get additional details,
or you can collapse them to view what's happening
across all your tenants.
One of the most important things to highlight here is
that if you have a high number of tenants,
you can mark some of them as your favorite.
This is extremely beneficial to admins who want
to float their production tenants at the top,
because you may not be very keen
to understand what's happening with respect
to your test tenants or your production tenants at the top,
or for tenants that you work more often with.
So now let's ahead and understand,
one, to get a fair understanding of what's happening
for each of your tenants.
How do you go ahead and support your customers
and your end users?
So for that, we'll click on the service health.
So at your very first glance,
you are now informed of any issues affecting your tenants.
The insights at the top of the page draw attention
to the number of incidents
and the advisories affecting any of your tenants.
In addition, it also communicates the services affected
by all the incidents.
And without any additional navigation,
you have a comprehensive view of all the services,
along with the details of the incident
and the advisories affecting them.
You could also collapse all the services
and see which other services are impacted.
You get to see all the healthy services,
and this is a list of all the services that are subscribed
or activated by your tenants.
When you look at this data,
there's one important question that is getting answered.
In addition to just knowing what incidents
or advisories are impacting your services,
it's also telling you how many of attendants are impacted.
It does it at the service level,
and it also does it at the individual issue level.
So let me expand this, so you can have a clear view
of what these issues are.
So you can see the title of the issues here,
along with the status, number of tenants affected,
the ID of the incident
and the start time and the last updated time.
So you have all the information, some of the information
on the metadata information associated
with the issue displayed here.
So as an admin, when you're responding to a user complaint
or you're practically monitoring the issues,
your next logical step is to understand the gravity
of the issues and to learn about the latest updates,
which is done by clicking on the incident.
So let's go ahead and click on the incident.
The right panel provides those important set of details
under the overview tab for you
to take necessary actions as appropriate.
For example, you either want to inform your customers
or you want to share work ground, et cetera, et cetera.
One important thing, unlike your single tenant experience,
you can now click on the tenant affected tab
to view the list of all the tenants affected
by the particular incident
and the respective status for each tenant.
Yes, the incident status is not available
on the main all services
or all issues list unlike the single-tenant experience,
since the status could be different for different tenants.
For example, some of your tenants could be
in a service interruption state where they're not able
to do anything with the service while some tenants could be
in the service degradation state when the services slow,
or the issue is intermittent.
You can use the filter options
to view the list by a specific status.
In this case, all the tenants have the same status.
So if I click on it, it filters to a same list.
So I'm going to clear the filter here, there you go.
One more thing to talk about,
I referred to the favorites on the alternate page.
Note that all the tenants that you marked as favorites
on the alternative page are showing up at the top.
So this is super helpful if you are trying to focus
on certain customers or certain tenants.
One of the other key asks from customers was the ability
to inform your users or customers from here,
and many admins shared
that they use different modalities like Teams, Yammer
or third party tools to communicate to the end users.
So what we have done is we have incorporated the ability
to export the list of the effective tenants into a CSV,
such that you can share it with your support teams
and they can in turn service their end users.
So let's go ahead and open this file and
you can see the list of tenants.
You can see which ones are favorite.
You can see the status and you can see the default domain.
[indistinct] to have them open.
All right, there's one other view
that flatly lists out all the issues
and that's the all issues view.
On this view, you can filter based on the issue type,
so if you want to focus only on the incidents,
then you can filter it based on the incidents
or the advisories or if you
want to focus on only one services
then you can do that as well.
For example, Yammer, so now apparently there is no issue
with incident Yammer which is a good thing.
All right, so this comes in handy for admins,
our support teams who are focusing on a specific workload.
And even from this list, you can still get to more details
and the list of tenants by just clicking on the incident,
which comes in handy.
So what have we done, we have attempted to flip the focus
of your support experience
from a reactive to a proactive one.
You can now use this dashboard to identify all the tenants
that are impacted and informed them accordingly.
If you do not see an issue here,
you can still navigate into the context of a single tenant
and report an issue on their behalf.
For example, you can go back to
all tenants view,
click on a specific tenant
in whose context you want to get into.
So in this case, I'm going to click into ConTho, CSP only,
and then if you're not seeing,
any issue that's impacting your users for this tenant,
you can come in and report an issue on their behalf.
Now you may ask why not have reporting an issue
on behalf of multiple tenants or share the tenant lists
from the service health dashboard itself?
Why an email or some other modality?
I'll set up notifications across all your tenants.
Now, this is exactly why we want to hear from you.
Tell us what are the functionality
or insights should we build and prioritize
to ensure we help you be more productive
and successful at supporting your customers
with service health communications.
Alright, so far so good.
But what about change management communications?
Hmm, here's the good news.
I'm happy to share that we are working
on a multi-tenant management view of message center.
And the idea here is the same,
that is to provide a glimpse
into all the important change communications
and their respective tenants that they apply to.
The guiding principle for us is to ensure you don't have
to log into each tenant individually,
and instead we want to build efficiency
in your daily processes by enabling actions across tenants.
Having said that, our work is not done.
We have made major strides in enabling you to switch
between tenants and to get access to state
across all your tenants through aggregated views.
However, we still have work to do,
on doing repetitive actions across tenants
and spotting and synchronizing differences between them.
Some of the future releases that we are working on
on the service communication side of things
are building the multi-tenant administration scenarios
for message center, building the incident history
for all your tenants and then giving you the ability
to perform bulk actions across tenants
in the service health, for example subscribing
to notifications, reporting an issue on behalf
of your customer or sharing incident details.
So we look forward to your feedback
and we hope you will be able to take the survey
or will be able to join our customer panel
to share your experiences.
We are super excited to bring these experiences to you,
and we're hoping you're just as excited.
On that note, thank you very much for attending this session
and have a great, great day.