The Office 365 admin center has been in the works for over a year now. At Microsoft Ignite 2016, the company announced that it is finally breaking free to general availability.
With its latest release, the Office 365 admin center has received a few more updates since the last preview. The new version brings basic improvements to design, performance, and functionality around the board, with the most visible changes occuring on the home page where most of the common tasks are easily found. Checking your notifications, configuring your settings, and adding or editing a user including their licenses is all readily accessible.
Furthermore, you will be able to see even more users on a single page and edit them in bulk, up to 100 users at a time. Other small improvements were also added such as choosing a language preference for your Message Center and a better way to report through the new usage report dashboard.
The blog post explains that “the usage reports will be accompanied by a Power BI content pack that will allow you to share the reports and to pivot by attributes like region or department,” and the following video provides an overview of the Office 365 admin center.
Administrators should also able to look forward to using the new Service health dashboard. This tool will help administrators assess service incidents, improve internal support, and assist with the Office 365 experience for their organization’s employees. Outages of services can be indicated as incidents compared to minor situations which are better categorized as advisories.
With more critical information available to you in quick summaries and important details upon inspection, the Service health dashboard will help you respond more efficiently. You can even see how many people are affected by the service incident at a glance.
The Service health dashboard will also be adding more functionality in the future such as reporting issues that aren’t being shown directly to feedback, signing up for notifications through text and/or email, accessing a full list of impacted users, and allowing you to request on-demand user health checks to monitor risks. Stay up to date on changes to the admin center at the Office 365 blog.
