(rock music)
- Hello and welcome back to Microsoft Mechanics Live.
Coming up we're gonna take a first look
at a couple of new features in the unified admin experience
for Microsoft 365
which is gonna give you common entry point
for your managing of Windows, Office 365,
and Enterprise Mobility Plus Security.
We're gonna show you the updates of the admin center
where you can customize your view with tasks,
insights, and usage reporting.
More streamlined user-centric management experiences
to save you time with the most common tasks in a single view
and intelligent recommendations also guide you through
not only first time setup,
but also ongoing configuration
of a better end user experience and better IT experience
with intelligence infused.
So to do that I'm joined by Brian Besand
from the Microsoft 365 Admin Team, welcome.
- Thank you Jeremy, great to be here,
I've actually watched the show quite a bit
so I'm excited to actually be here
on my first session working with you today.
- Awesome, awesome stuff.
So tell me a little bit about the strategy
behind the Microsoft 365 Administration experience,
what's that experience like?
What does it mean then for Microsoft 365
and all the Office 365 admins that we have here among us?
- Sure, so Microsoft 365 is a new way
for us to design, and build, and deliver, and support
what used to be three very separate products,
and we're talking about Windows Office
and Enterprise Mobility and Security.
And all of that is really centered around the way
the end user works,
we wanted to kind of create a seamless experience
that helps them be productive and secure.
So we're thinking about that,
that's a great experience for the end user,
we wanna build a similar experience
that's centered around the way
that the IT team actually works
so that we can break down some of those silos
among those products
and focus on their teams and their tasks.
So we used to have these 23 entry points
and a lot of you guys recognize some of those.
Portal.Office.com, and then I got out to Intune,
and then I go out to Store for Business,
and what we're doing is really kind of centralizing those
into one common entry point.
Everybody goes to Admin.Microsoft.com,
that's gonna be the same for Office365 admins as well.
If you use Portal.Office.com, that's the same experience,
this is what we're moving Portal.Office.com to.
Around that once central point of entry
we've got seven specialist work spaces
that are really centered around the IT teams.
So if we look at Compliance and Security,
that's a really good example where
Compliance and Security is not generally
handled by the same team or the same person,
we've split those out
and we've made sure that there's an opportunity for everyone
to really tailor that experience to what they're working on.
- [Jeremy] So why don't we take a look at
what that new experience looks like.
- Sure, so what we're looking at here
is the Admin.Microsoft.com,
this is a preview that we're rolling out this week,
so if you've already used this
and it doesn't look exactly like what you've got,
that's great,
these are the new features that you're gonna have access to,
and I'll tell you about how you
get access to those features in a little bit.
So it's optimized for you everyday tasks,
and we've built it to provide
a tailored experience around the unique needs
of your role or your organization.
You can see links to the specialist workspaces
over here on my left nav,
so that's where we put things like
device management and security.
And throughout, we wanna make sure
that we're highlighting data that's relevant to you
provide recommendations on how you can act on that data,
and we see some insights here for example
threats that Microsoft 365 has highlighted,
and we'll take a look at what
those recommendation engines look like in just a little bit.
- Okay, so why don't we start with
the most common use cases,
often times you call it things like everyday efficiency
or the things that you use every day.
How are we making that kind of day to day workload easier?
- [Brian] Totally,
so let's go back to Admin.Microsoft.com,
and it's built around a system of modular carts.
So when I first signed in
I had a very focused experience,
and I had the ability to pull up new cards
and really tailor this to what I really need to do.
So in this example, I'm a global admin,
I have access and rights to everything that's going on.
Notice that I have this basic section at the top,
that's stuff that I do every day,
and then we can tailor this,
if you're a security admin,
if you're a report reader,
if you're an exchange admin,
this experience looks unique to your task
and then you have further ability to customize that
on top of it.
- Okay
- So this is a mature admin center,
and I've pinned things like users and billing,
I have office software deployment down here
to see how we're working on adoption there.
All stuff I look at really frequently,
and again wanna call out,
I got information security grouped,
I've got this basic section,
it really helps me think okay,
I'm going into this mindset where I need to do
Tuesday morning 8 AM stuff,
or hey I wanna check up on what's going on with security.
And like I said, when I first signed in
I only saw four cards here,
really focused, our studies have said
hey if we give you a really focused experience
you get those important tasks done
and we walk you through things like
adding a domain, adding new users,
the really foundational stuff that you need to go from
hey we just paid Microsoft
to I've got a working tenant that's good.
- Kind of like the out of box
or the first run experience.
- Totally, we walk you through all that stuff.
So on your left nav pane,
you're gonna be able to drill down
on things like billing or users,
and again, we go down into those deeper
specialist work spaces like security,
device management, or even the exchange
or SharePoint or some of those more focused
service level kind of things that you're used to.
So let's look at another really common task.
So user management,
something that we know admins do all the time.
Something like 1.8 million admins per month
go to this pane and do some kind of management task.
- [Jeremy] This is probably the number one
thing that you're gonna do,
if you're a directory admin, or using Adger AD,
this is one of the consoles that you're always inside.
- [Brian] Totally, and this is all your basic stuff,
adding and removing users, resetting passwords,
troubleshooting licenses and devices,
all of that centers around the user, the person.
I'm not even talking about the panel, it's the human.
So we've made some changes to what you see
in this user tab,
and the first thing we wanted to do is
focus on these kind of big tasks.
We know that a lot of enterprises
wanna be able to perform actions in bulk.
I've got a big group of users,
I want to apply some kind of change to that person.
So in this list view,
I can customize what fields I wanna see
and then I can filter based on those fields.
So in this case, this kind of scenario,
I'm a global admin,
and I manage my entire Australian office as a unit.
I've gone ahead and built a filter already,
so I know when I wanna make changes
to my Australian office,
I can go straight to that filter
and I can show all those guys.
- [Jeremy] Okay.
- [Brian] I can multi-select on those users,
so if I wanna again, change licensing, set passwords,
I can do that in this view,
I can select multiple of those guys,
and you'll see the things like manage their roles,
manage their licenses,
assign to a group all pops up,
and if that design language feels
really similar to what we're doing in SharePoint,
there's a reason for that,
we're starting to pull some of these together.
- [Jeremy] Right, these are some of the things
that I'd probably be using pipelining
inside of Power Shell and using
the MS Online Powershell Gallery Module to do all of this.
Now we can do this and kind of
have that kind of bulk control within the portal
without having to go into scripting.
- Totally, that's exactly what we're trying to do
is pull out what used to be these really complex giant tasks
put them right here in the graphical user interface.
So let's imagine that I've got a really specific user,
one person, he calls me and he's having problems,
and he doesn't even know what it is,
we gotta figure out how we're gonna troubleshoot him.
So Aaron calls me,
and I've pulled a bunch of information
from what used to be different areas
around the admin experience into this one view.
- [Jeremy] So this is a brand new view,
this is something that we've never shown before, right?
- [Brian] This is a new view
and we've got new stuff in here.
So I can take quick actions, like I can reset his password,
or I can block him,
or I can just delete him entirely.
I can see all the details about when he last signed in,
where he came from, all that kind of stuff,
but we're bringing in more information
across devices and licenses and apps
and other areas into this view, so I can pivot through here.
- [Jeremy] You can see everything about Aaron
in terms of all the things that he might call you for
in terms of help, or problems or something with the service.
- The high level stuff,
I can still go into Intune and all those other experiences
that are really deep,
but I can also get a lot of the really quick stuff
done right here.
So for example, I don't have to jump out
to some kind of device management console
with various tools.
I can go right in here,
I can look at Aaron's desktop
and I can see oh okay, that's compliant,
he last checked in on this date,
we know he last signed in from this,
I have all that information right there
and if I want to, if something's wrong,
I can reset his machine,
or I can get him out of our system altogether
and I can simply remove company data from that device.
- Very cool,
so analytics and insight,
something that everybody's really thinking about lately
in terms of how Office 365 is really using
analytics and insights to help understand
what's happening with our users,
what's happening to their tenants,
how do they respond with it,
all these things that we can power now
with all the data that we have,
what's new there?
- Totally, so this is the other area,
a lot of those common tasks
are what we talk to admins a lot about,
what's going on in my tenant
is another great example of this.
So every service, including but not limited to Microsoft 365
generates a massive amount of data.
And it can be really overwhelming to know
what am I looking at?
What should I look at?
What should I do about it?
So we're taking what we know about your user base
and we're crossing that with best practices
from around the industry,
so surface the types of information
that we think you should be looking at,
and then we're going a step further than that actually.
The Microsoft 365 Admin Center
can actually recommend the next action
that provides the best possible experience
for your end user in your organization.
So for my example here,
when I go back to my Admin Center,
I see a recommendation up here
in the top section of my home page.
And this ones about some questionable activity
with my users.
Where they're signing in
and how they're signing in from.
If they sign in from California at 10'o'clock,
then all of a sudden they're in Germany at 11'o'clock,
something weird is going on there, right?
- [Jeremy] Simply a good use case
for conditional access maybe.
- [Brian] Right, we're there.
So I'm gonna see,
alright Microsoft 365,
what do you recommend that I do here?
So it provides me a little bit of information
here at the top,
what is this recommendation?
what are these types of policies?
And then it gives me some options
for the most common settings.
I now get to decide what I wanna do here.
I can dismiss this entirely,
I'm not gonna give MFA to my users.
I can actually click in on customize policies
and it will take me out of this experience
and give me deeper granular control
over who this applies to
or what kind of things it applies to.
- [Jeremy] Got it.
- [Brian] I also have the ability to
exclude certain types of users
directly in this screen from applying these policies,
but in this case I think this is actually a pretty good idea
we're gonna roll this out,
it's gonna be mandatory for all my admins,
and then I'm gonna have all my users enroll in it
so when something fishy does happen,
they have MFA, they can use that second factor
to authorize in.
- Do you know that MFA in this case,
multi factor auth, actually helps stop 99.9 percent
of the attacks that are coming in from identity vectors,
so it's a huge thing to do,
especially for admins,
all your admin accounts right now
should be MFA protects.
- I did not know that,
when we go back to Redmond I'm gonna email you,
I'm gonna get the source,
and I'm gonna work that into all the marketing materials
we do from here on out.
In this case let's go ahead and create that policy,
let's roll that out, so it's going out right now,
and it's actually rolling that out to my users.
And what it also did
was pin a card to my dashboard
to say hey, remember you've
enabled multi-factor authentication,
but it's also gonna give me
a running tally of what's going on right there.
So I can come in and I can look
and I can see man that's a lot of flagged users
and a lot of risky sign-ins that happened today,
what's going on?
If I wanna do some investigation I can click in,
I've got other ways to access that information
and see what's going on.
We also provide a lot of usage data
around what your end users are doing,
how they're adopting your office services,
and what they're doing within that.
For example, how are they communicating,
or how are they collaborating.
We've got a set of pre-defined reports
here in the reporting tab in the Admin Center,
but you can also dive a lot deeper
if you wanna create custom views, custom shares,
if you wanna do something
we haven't even though of with that data
to ensure that you're really getting what you're supposed to
out of the things that you're paying for,
but also you've got these services
to drive some kind of digital transformation,
is that goal happening?
You can pull that all out via PowerBI, via Microsoft Graph.
- So these are all great updates
that I'm assuming that this account
that you're logged in with as a global admin,
but what does it look like
now that we can do kind of more our back style controls
for different admin types,
what do those views look like?
Is that different?
- Totally, and that's a really foundational part
of what we're trying to build here.
As we know not everyone is a global admin,
and not everyone should have global access.
So if you're a reporting admin,
or a billing admin, or a security admin,
we're gonna provide you with a really similar experience.
You're still gonna come in at Admin.Microsoft.com,
but you're gonna see something
that is custom to you,
we've provided you a start up experience
that's tailored to what we know about your role,
but we also let you customize it
just like I customized my global account.
So I've actually set you up over here
as a security admin, and we can take a look at your screen,
and we can see the types of things
that we see for you as a security admin
at our organization here.
- Alright so I'm in my brand new admin center,
brand new look and feel.
It does look pretty clean, pretty different.
If I kind of zoom in here
I can kind of see a few things.
Let me just look up in the corner
of all the different things that I've got.
So here I can see,
I've got a trimmed down
set of left hand navigation items here
just for me as a security admin.
I can also say I can help users identify
and classify sensitive information.
Here I see all the unlabeled docs,
using that intelligence again like we saw earlier
to say hey there's potentially a problem
that might arise because you've got
a bunch of information that's out there that's sensitive.
Might contain social security numbers,
credit cards, other information,
we're actually able to see some of those,
those signals and then basically
give you a recommendation that says
you should look at classifying that
and taking those controls.
And we're trying to do that in a way that is not obtrusive,
that is really beneficial to the end user.
- Right, and if I look down here
I can see Office 365 advanced threat protection.
Some of the things that we're actually doing,
some of the proactive things that we're doing
to block malicious links and attachments or malware.
I can also see, like we saw earlier,
kind of flagged user and risky sign-ins,
and it's always good to see here
no reported issues.
- [Brian] It's always good to see a zero incidents, right?
- [Jeremy] Right, so these are some of the,
kind of the customized views that I have then
as a security admin.
So this is really cool,
we saw some brand new user experiences there
to manage the user settings all from one place.
We saw the kind of our back
and trimmed down and streamlined support
for different admin roles.
What's the timing on all this stuff?
Because I know that people are probably seeing
maybe a few changes here and there
in their Admin Center,
but when does all this start to roll out?
- Sure, so we took a look at a couple of
the really key features that we wanna show off,
but there's a whole lot more that we didn't list here.
So this public preview is actually rolling out right now.
If you're a targeted release admin,
you're gonna be the first to see it,
you may see it as early as later this week,
but we're eventually gonna roll that out to
all types of admins soon.
So when that preview does become available,
you'll see a toggle in your left hand screen here,
and it looks very similar if you're in
the older style admin experience.
If you flip that you'll get to see
the new design language,
all the features that we've added,
but you'll always have the option to revert back.
- [Jeremy] So you can always go back to the older version
as you get comfortable with the newer version.
- Exactly, we're managing risk.
And as we get new features into that preview mode,
and as we get closer to releasing this
into general availability,
we'll be updating the technical documentation
and we're gonna show a link here in just a little bit
that'll help keep you updated on what is coming after that.
So that preview is available to everybody soon.
The most we're saying right now
about Real GA on that is H1 of calendar 19.
- Alright so this is a great first look,
kind of some brand new stuff here
that was all working code.
So how to we make sure that admins
can actually learn more,
get their hands on some of this stuff?
what should they actually be consuming then
to make sure that they can actually start trying this?
- Totally, so if you are an admin,
if you work in the admin center,
start entering through admin.microsoft.com.
Portal.office.com, all those old URLs,
a lot of them redirect,
but this is really gonna be the center of gravity
for admin and Microsoft 365 and 0365 moving forward.
Keep an eye out for the preview toggle,
that's gonna be rolling out
like I said to targeted release to admins first,
and to everybody over the next couple weeks.
As soon as you get that
go ahead and flip that if you're curious,
you're not gonna break anything,
you're not gonna affect your end users,
you're not gonna affect your other admins.
Once you get in there there's a feedback button
in the bottom right,
and we get a lot of feedback,
we do read all of that feedback.
There's a team of humans in Redmond, Washington,
I'm on that team, we read those.
We really do think about what you guys like,
what you don't like,
what you wanna see in that admin center.
So make sure that you're dropping us feedback in that way.
And then most of all,
I know there's a lot of Office365 admins,
specifically here in the audience
that are using that admin center
but haven't yet made the jump to Microsoft 365,
think about what adding Enterprise Mobility and Security,
and Windows on to Office,
what that benefit is gonna bring to your end users.
Right now in the experience,
you can trial E3,
we're working on bring an E5 trial out very soon.
- Very cool, good stuff,
lot's of great updates of course.
We're gonna keep tracking all the admin updates
for Microsoft 365 and more,
keep watching, hit subscribe, and we'll see you next time,
goodbye for now.
- Thanks guys.
(applause)
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