The Office 365 Admin Center is a critical tool for tenant admins. Recently, Microsoft has improved the management of role assignments by providing a way to compare what different roles can do. The idea is that if you know exactly what a role enables people to do, you’re less likely to assign the wrong role to the wrong people.
Microsoft has introduced a new Roles page in the Office 365 Admin Center. The new page lists all the roles available in an Office 365 tenant and allows admins to quickly see who holds each role, and add or remove accounts from roles as needed. It’s a small but important change that is welcome because it makes it easier for tenants to manage permissions.
Microsoft has released the GA version of the Azure Information Protection client, which reads information about Office 365 sensitivity labels and policies from the Security and Compliance Center. It’s one more step along the path to making it easy for Office 365 tenants to protect their data. Work still has to be done, but at least we can see light at the end of the encryption tunnel.
The Office 365 Admin Center offers the option to bulk-create user accounts. Loading up a CSV file with details and having it processed is simple enough, but the resulting accounts need some work before they are fit for purpose and ready for people to use. Here’s how the bulk creation process works and why we think it has some flaws.
In a sign of how automation based on signals gathered by Office 365 will emerge to help administrators do a better job, the preview of the new Admin Center offered to create a DLP policy to protect some sensitive information that I had clearly overlooked. Well-intended as the portal was, its efforts to create the new policy failed. That’s not really important – it’s the glimpse into the future which is.