Microsoft 365 management and automation
Microsoft 365 is one of, if not the most important piece of software in your company. Without it, collaboration and productivity as we define them today would go out of the window. So how do people usually manage it?
Pick your poison. You can try to automate everything with PowerShell or go full manual management mode with a lot of people involved. Both of these strategies require throwing copious amounts of resources at them for mediocre returns.
Adaxes offers you a third option – a combined approach of easy-to-setup automation and a user-friendly Web interface to delegate sporadic manual tasks.
Microsoft 365 automation
You can simplify the user account lifecycle to three stages – onboarding, maintenance, and offboarding. If you automate Microsoft 365 license assignment for every stage for every user account, that's 90% of your Microsoft 365 tasks gone.
Adaxes tackles the automation of these tasks with customizable workflows that can be triggered by specific events in your directory. For example, you can create a workflow that will assign licenses to new users immediately after creation.
Some of you might say "Hold on a moment, we have a hybrid environment and we surely must wait for synchronization before Adaxes can assign licenses or perform other tasks for the cloud account." Well, not exactly.
When you create an account on-premises, Adaxes will create the cloud account instead of waiting for Entra Connect. Entra Connect will simply link these accounts when it runs. This approach enables you to mix tasks for on-premises and cloud accounts in the same workflow – Adaxes will know where to do what.
It also simplifies the initial Exchange Online mailbox configuration. Normally, after you assign an Exchange Online license, you have to wait until the mailbox is ready before configuring it. Not to mention that you also need to create a remote mailbox in the on-premises Exchange.
With Adaxes, you can predefine all mailbox parameters like calendar permissions, storage quotas, etc. in your onboarding workflow. Adaxes will wait until the mailbox is ready and will configure it as soon as it is. Oh, and that remote mailbox will also be taken care of.
More about Exchange automation
With onboarding solved, what's next? Maintenance? There's no need to go far – you can take advantage of the same license assignment workflow you created for onboarding.
You can make it trigger when users move between departments, when they get a new job title, when they are transferred to another office. Adaxes will re-evaluate what Microsoft 365 licenses and services the user should have according to your rules and will update the user if needed.
You can also put that workflow on a schedule for good measure – every morning Adaxes will ensure that everyone in your company has the correct licenses, even if someone fiddled with them an evening before.
How to automatically assign Microsoft 365 licenses
Finally, the offboarding stage is more or less simple. Revoke all licenses, block user access to Microsoft 365, and force logout from all systems. Automate this process and never have a hanging license on a long-forgotten inactive account again.
The workflow steps might be different but the concept stays the same – you can launch such a workflow in a single click with the help of custom commands, make it trigger after any event of your choice, or put it on a schedule. For example, automatically launch it when the user's termination date comes.
As you can see, automating Microsoft 365 tasks during the entire user lifecycle is not rocket science. You only need to have a well-defined logic in mind. If the license assignment policies in your company change, adjusting your automation rules in Adaxes can be done within the same day.
Manage Microsoft 365 efficiently
We are so used to managing Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Entra ID, and Exchange from different admin portals, that we never think how efficient would it be to have one admin center for everything.
The Web interface in Adaxes is exactly that – a single point of control for all these systems. You can assign Microsoft 365 licenses, add users to groups, change their account properties, modify their mailbox settings, all from the same web page.
Having access to all systems makes the Web interface a great tool for the admins. However, if you want to delegate Microsoft 365 tasks to business users, you will need something more refined. Seeing too many buttons and menus can be overwhelming for the uninitiated.
That's why the Web interface can be customized and stripped of any functionality that you don't want your users to touch. If allowing department managers to assign licenses is what you are after, your Web interface can become exactly that, nothing more, nothing less.
Even the license assignment part can be simplified. For example, you can allow assigning only specific licenses and services, change the display name of each license and service, hide the details about your Microsoft 365 tenant, user location, user sign-in status... Being able to customize even the tiniest details lets you adapt the Web interface for any category of users.
Combine this with a role-based access model for granular permission management, and you've got yourself a solid foundation to delegate the last 10% of your Microsoft 365 tasks.
Finally, you can top it off by delegating license assignment to users themselves. The Web interface can act as a self-service portal where every user will be able to urgently obtain any extra license they might need for their job. Better yet, you can allow them to only request licenses and let their managers or helpdesk approve or deny these requests.
More about approval-based workflows
Manage multiple tenants
Adaxes can handle any number of Microsoft 365 tenants, including tenants from secure clouds like GCC High. You only need to register each tenant once and select what object should be included in its scope. For example, all objects in a domain, objects located in specific OUs, or members of specific groups.
The beauty of this model is that managing several organizations becomes trivial – no matter which user or group you open in the Web interface, Adaxes will pull the Microsoft 365 data for that object from the correct tenant without asking you for different credentials every time.
If you want to delegate permissions so that users can see and modify only objects from their own organization, you can have that. If you want a super admin account with rights in every Microsoft 365 organization and every domain you manage, you can have that as well...
One of the ideas behind Adaxes is to provide flexible but simple tools for solving complex problems. The built-in functionality will optimize or straight-up eliminate most of your typical Microsoft 365 tasks. Once you get familiar with Adaxes, you will build Microsoft 365 workflows capable of literally anything (maybe with a bit of scripting here and there). Just be careful and don't automate yourself out of your job.
