Mastering Microsoft 365

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, everybody, and welcome to Virtual TEC. This session is about mastering Microsoft 365, and I'm Tony Redmond. I'm an independent consultant. I've been in the industry for a long time. I'm an editorial director and contributor to Practical 365, where we write about everything to do with Microsoft 365 at a very practical level. And we're always looking for new writers for if you want to take on that challenge. I'm also the lead editor of the Office 365 for IT Pros book, and one of the things that's relevant about that book to this session is that there's so much change in Microsoft 365 that we have to republish the book every month. So that just gives you a little bit of an insight. So this session is all about unicorns. Now, unicorns are a mythical creature, or so you might think. But in fact in the business world, there is a definition for what a unicorn is, and it's an employee who makes a lot of difference to people. It's an employee who actually knows their stuff. It's an employee who knows all their stuff about everything. And so when you're coming to think about Microsoft 365, what would a Microsoft 365 unicorn look like? Well, it would probably be somebody who knows a lot about Microsoft 365, and that is the purpose of this session. My goal is to give you some ideas. I'm not going to give you a recipe. I'm going to give you some ideas about how you can become a Microsoft 365 unicorn. It's not saying that you have to wear a horn coming out of your head. That's strictly optional. But we'll give you some ideas about all the other stuff. So some points that I want to discuss. I want to chat a little bit about the changing role of IT admins in the world. I want to talk about knowledge, because you need knowledge to be able to master and understand Microsoft 365. And in fact, we'll think about this a little bit, of is it actually possible to acquire so much knowledge that you can master Microsoft 365? It's a little thought that we have to talk about. And then finally, we'll ask the question, do these mythical creatures-- these Microsoft 365 unicorns-- do they exist, or should we just give up and go home? OK, what do you have to do to become a unicorn? Very, very pertinent question. So I said I wanted to start by talking about the changing role of IT administrators. And when we ran on-prem servers, when we ran Active Directory, when we ran Windows 2003, we were in charge of the world. You could do anything you wanted. You ran your own ecosystem. You decided what software was there. You decided when backups were taken. You decided when service packs were installed. You decided what third party software you would integrate. You were master of the universe. But the point is that you were a master of your own little universe. Everything changes with cloud services. With cloud services you're no longer the master because mastery is exerted by the cloud providers-- by Microsoft, by Amazon, by Google. And you no longer have that central role of deciding what goes where and when. So in fact, when we look at what IT admins can do, all they can really do is tweak things. You can't dictate the quality of service that your users are going to get. That's going to be a function of the cloud provider and, perhaps, even your internet service provider. All you can do is tweak settings. So that means that you can accept that and become a master tweaker, or you can do something more proactive. And the thing that I would like you to think about is how you can become more proactive. How you can help the organization exploit cloud services to the maximum because that's really what we've got to get into. Instead of just accepting that, oh well, Microsoft does everything, let's think about being proactive. Let's think about taking that leading role in the organization. And that means that we want to master new applications and services. We want to understand how that can be used. We want to understand how, in particular, they can be used to remove business benefit, because then you become an absolute hero to the organization. And we want to seek out opportunities that exist in cloud services to fix problems that you can see in the business, or that your users can see in the business. And if we remember the point I made right at the start-- Microsoft 365 is not static. It changes all the time. And because it changes all the time, you've got an opportunity to keep on going back and keep on asking questions. Is there something new coming that maybe can be used by the organization to fix a problem? So it's quite a proactive role you can take if you want to take it. I think there are three basic rules that admins can follow in this search to be proactive. First, you've got to break down the on-premises silos that may or may not exist in your organization, or that may or may not exist in your own head. An on-premises silo is a way of thinking about how things were run on-premises. But as we've just discussed, it's a different ballgame and what you did on-premises is no longer valid in the cloud. The second thing is to focus on what you can influence. You can't influence Microsoft. Forget that. Maybe the largest, biggest, most-- how would you call it-- the most lucrative customers in the world can influence Microsoft when it comes to Microsoft 365. But at the scale that the service runs, supporting some 370-odd million users, you come along to Microsoft with your 20,000 users and you say, wow, this is