Esbjerg Municipality uses Easy365Manager to improve the daily Office 365 administration
”When you’re running hybrid Microsoft 365, as we do here in Esbjerg, it works very well. I certainly recommend any municipality to take a good look at Easy365Manager.”
Martin Balsby
IT Administrator
Esbjerg Municipality
What is Esbjerg Municipality?
Esbjerg Municipality is Denmark’s sixth largest municipality and is situated with a great view of Nationalpark Vadehavet, that was added to UNESCO’s list of world heritage in 2014.
For the past two decades, Esbjerg Municipality has positioned itself as the absolute Energy Metropol of Denmark. This status was further consolidated in May 2022 with the signing of the Esbjerg Agreement that announced the construction of 150 gigawatts of sea wind power before 2050.
The 12,000 employees of the municipality service the citizens and companies of Esbjerg, and the IT infrastructure is based on hybrid Office 365.
Troublesome IT Administration
The introduction of Microsoft 365 has been strenuous to the IT employees of the municipality with the inclusion of hybrid (Exchange) provisioning, on-premises AD, and Azure AD.
The administration of Exchange mailboxes was fragmented, and the IT service desk had to navigate many different admin tools; the goal was to work from one unified tool.
It’s confusing to the employees to switch between multiple tools to solve a relatively simple task, e.g., create or configure shared mailboxes and calendar rights.
Previously, delegating calendar rights was only possible via complex PowerShell scripts or third-party tools.
Easy Solution
In 2020 IT administrator Martin Balsby looked for a solution to simplify Office 365 administration. He ended up installing Easy365Manager, which is now used by both IT operations and the service desk.
One of the things Martin Balsby found most appealing was that Easy365Manager integrates with Active Directory Users & Computers. A tool that the IT support team is already familiar with.
It has been ‘very easy’ to introduce the IT staff to Easy365Manager as they are already familiar with the user interface.
“We didn’t really do much of it,” Martin Balsby says with a smile. “We just informed the staff that there are now a few new buttons available; that was basically it. And, of course, we did a small post on our intranet to describe the tiny amount of configuration that’s needed to use Easy365Manager.”
Implementation and Security
Esbjerg Municipality runs Easy365Manager on a shared management server used by the service desk team to run Active Directory Users & Computers via remote desktop.
“The implementation was very easy. The only challenge we found was the switch to MS Graph in the latest update, but we received great support on that,” Martin Balsby says.
Due to the security design of Easy365Manager and MS 365 PIM, all employees are still using their personal login when working with Microsoft 365, exactly as they did using the standard Microsoft web consoles.
This also means that any changes continue to be logged for the individual employees. “We have not had any concerns regarding security,” Martin Balsby states.
“The administration of Exchange mailboxes was fragmented, and the IT service desk had to navigate many different admin tools; the goal was to work from one unified tool.”
Management and Support
Easy365Manager has continued to receive new updates during the last two years. One of these updates, the ability to manage calendar permissions, was actually a request from Esbjerg Municipality.
And the continuous updates and upgrades of Easy365Manager are not something Martin Balsby considers challenging.
“We’ve done quite a few upgrades, and it’s rather simple. We only saw one problem during our two years using Easy365Manager,” he reveals. “Easy365Manager solved the problem in cooperation with our Microsoft support, and they fixed it quickly.”
Recommended to Other Municipals
Easy365Manager is licensed per tenant. This makes for an appealing business case, especially for larger companies and organizations.
”The price tag on Easy365Manager is not something that leaves us frowning,” Martin Balsby says.
Also, there are absolutely no indirect costs by using Easy365Manager as it’s a simple plugin you easily install wherever Active Directory Users & Computers is already running.
“When you’re running hybrid Microsoft 365, as we do here in Esbjerg, it works very well,” Martin Balsby finishes. “I certainly recommend any municipality to take a good look at Easy365Manager.”