Easy Office 365 Administration

Office 365 offers a lot of benefits to companies and organizations. Providing users with scalable and secure applications has never been easier.

But one thing that hasn’t improved with the introduction of hybrid Office 365 is the administration and management.

On the contrary – it’s gotten a lot worse!

What’s the Problem With Office 365 Administration?

Admins working with hybrid Office 365 are facing several issues today.

The following sections list the three most common complaints from our customers.

1. Fragmented management

To manage a single user with a single mailbox, you need multiple tools in a hybrid Office 365 environment:

  • Active Directory Users & Computers is used to manage AD user properties
  • On-premises Exchange is required in order to manage email addresses, hide-from-address-lists and more
  • Azure AD Connect is needed to trigger immediate synchronization of AD changes to Azure AD
  • Microsoft 365 Admin Center (or Azure Portal) is needed to manage Office 365 licenses
  • PowerShell is needed in multiple cases (e.g., calendar delegation, mailbox quotas, etc.)

The constant switching between all of these different admin tools is a real annoyance in the daily Office 365 administration.

Imagine if you could manage all of the above in one unified management tool!

2. Attribute Authority is Confusing

In the hybrid Office 365 setup, some attributes are authoritative in your local on-premises Active Directory, while others are authoritative in your Azure AD/Exchange Online.

To many admins, this logic can be hard to follow.

If e.g., you try to edit email addresses in the Exchange Online Admin Center, you’ll receive an error message like this:

The operation on mailbox failed because it's out of the current user's write scope. The action Set-Mailbox EmailAddresses can't be performed on the object because the object is being synchronized from your on-premises organization. This action should be performed on the object in your on-premises organization.

Imagine if you never had to think about attribute authority again!

3. Exchange On-Premises Is Still Needed

To many organizations, the initial motivation to implement a hybrid Office 365 solution is to get rid of the complexity of running an on-premises Exchange Server.

Naturally, it’s a massive disappointment to many admins when they find out that they still need to run an on-premises Exchange Server to manage on-premises mail attributes.

Although the Exchange Server license itself is complimentary from Microsoft, there are many hidden costs associated with Exchange on-premises:

  • The Windows operating system license
  • Third-party software licenses for antivirus, backup, and monitoring
  • Patch management
  • Troubleshooting

On top of this, you find the added risk of Exchange on-premise being a frequent target of zero-day exploits. For example, in the first half of 2021, more than 100.000 servers were hit by the Hafnium zero-day exploit. It quickly morphed into a ransomware attack.

All organizations running on-premises Exchange were forced to spend hours checking if they had been hit and applying the hotfixes released by Microsoft.

Imagine if you could remove your on-premises Exchange Server!

How to Easily Manage Office 365?

To this date, only one tool exists that will solve all of the above problems.

Easy365Manager is a snap-in to Active Directory Users & Computers that allows you to manage your Office 365 licenses and mailboxes as part of your AD management.

  • You need only one (familiar) tool for your daily administration
  • You don’t need to worry about attribute authority
  • You can uninstall your on-premises Exchange Server

With Easy365Manager, you get two new tabs in user properties in AD:

User Properties Tycho Brahe License Management
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User Properties Tycho Brahe Mailbox Management
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Using these new tabs, you can efficiently perform all daily administration of your hybrid Office 365 users.

Assign a new Office 365 license (enable Exchange Online mailbox):

Manage email addresses (proxyAddresses) with automated error and uniqueness checks:

Configure mailbox calendar permissions on any user mailbox:

Configure automatic replies:

As well as many, many other features.

For a complete list of Easy365Manager features, please have a look here.

Summary

If you’re looking for an easy way to manage your Office 365 hybrid environment, Easy365Manager is a must.

The license fee is easily covered by removing your on-premises Exchange Server.

You can test all features with the fully functional 30-day trial available here.

Easy365Manager comes with email and phone support – also during the trial period.