Cloud Services Like Good Networks
As a cloud service, Office 365 depends on good internet access between client and service. The last mile of customer networks are usually the area where most problems occur. Once network traffic enters Microsoft’s network, packets travel quickly to their destination over dark fiber connections.
As I say in this article, “if you use the principles of yesterday to protect the services of today, your network is likely to deliver degraded connectivity to users.” Unfortunately, too many Office 365 tenants have poor and outdated local networks.
In any case, keeping track of the IP addresses and ranges used by Office 365 is an important part of maintaining network connectivity. Microsoft makes that endpoint data available for anyone to consume, and from August 21, 2018, they are using a new publishing platform. Old links continue to work but it is still wise to acquaint yourself with what Microsoft is doing in this space to ensure that your network uses the latest and most accurate information.
Here’s a nice example of a script that might help you automate some endpoint housekeeping for Office 365. And here’s another idea based on Flow to help with much the same thing.
We cover this topic in Chapter 2 of Office 365 for IT Pros. Read more about the network principles to use with Office 365 there.
I love the idea to use Microsoft Flow to get the notification if an update is needed.
My initial idea to use PowerShell to automate everything, the foundation of the script from Jan, doesn’t have something like this. The problem of such a notification is the complex scheduling.