Evaluation of Office 365

Contents

Introduction

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

Task 4

Task 5

Works Cited

Introduction

This report aims to discuss the various aspects of Office 365. The role of the email, instant messaging and the calendar in the productivity of the organisation is provided in this report. The analysis of the options that are available for the customers other than Office 365 is provided in this report. The discussion of how the simple migration helps the organisations in ensuring the smooth migration from the in house email to the Exchange online is provided in this report. The various PowerShell packages and the permissions that are required for managing office 365 through the PowerShell is briefly discussed in this report. The discussion of the basic PowerShell skills for managing, creating and removing the accounts and the licenses on office 365 is provided in this report.

Task 1

The role of the email is ubiquitous in the businesses in present times, the majority of the organisations utilise this service as the primary technique of communication among the various departments of the organisation. The business owners could execute the effective communication with the established distribution lists, send the information to any particular individuals as required along with the automatic forwarding of the information on the basis of any topic (Mark, et al., 2016). Majority of the software of email offers the feature of customisation that could be tailored according to the kind of the work that is performed, the condition of the email messages that are exchanged on a daily basis and the requirements of the employees. The effective utilisation of the email could help in reducing the over-dependence on the face-to-face meetings and the consultations. Some of the major advantages of the email are the:

• Versatility: Email could be used as the tool of mass marketing, the method of dealing with the queries of the customer and the swift method of exchanging the vital information and the documents.
• Instant service: Messages could be delivered instantly and these messages could be perceived by using any smartphones.
• Convenient: The messages could be checked and responded easily and it helps the organisation to solve any issue instantly.

The shared calendar is the type of the mass online diary, which could be utilised by the people in the business for effective collaboration and utilisation and the people of the organisation could view the appointments of the staff of the organisation. It helps in understanding the staff of the organisation that is available at any instant.

The formal, as well as the informal conversations, could be carried out using instant messaging (Katzer & Crawford, 2014). The instant messaging or the IM systems permits the conducting of live conversations using the internet with the other people. It is majorly used in transferring any instant update or the news to any department. The position of the manufacturing department could be relayed all through the organisation and the updates could be provided to the various people of the organisation that could help in increasing the productivity of the organisation significantly.

Task 2

There are several options that are available for the customers of the organisation from Office 365 and some of the options are:

Zoho office: This software comprises of all the aspects that are commonly required by the organisation. It comprises of the Word, Excel, PowerPoint along with the Project and Books that simplifies the maintaining track of the customers, finances and the employees (Taneja & Taneja, 2014). This software comprises of their own cloud storage system that is synced up with the documents of the office that has the tools for the analytics and the administrators. It also comprises of its own cloud storage and it is available for up to 25 members.

G suite: Google provides the free online office suite, which also packages offline support. The slides, sheets and the docs are also available in the G suite but it does not the optimised option of formatting as it is provided by the Microsoft Office. Along with the Google account, the customers could gain almost 15GB of cloud storage in the cloud for holding the documents and the customers could view, share or edit the documents easily (Machado & Bhoyar, 2017). This software is mostly oriented to the businesses and it offers the business email and the extensive support and the storage space.

WPS office: This software comprises of several options for choosing that includes the premium, free and the professional versions that are combined with the various features. The WPS Office Free provides the access to the Writer, Presentation, and the Spreadsheets and the almost 1GB of the cloud storage for letting the quick and the simplified sharing of the documents (Charlebois-Laprade, 2014). The WPS office provides the cloud storage that could be utilised for the storing of the documents and the files on the cloud along with added security.

Task 3

The simple migration helps in the migrating to Office 365 easily and in a simplified manner. It follows the basic process of the migration to Office 365 from the on-premise system. In the initial stage, the most appropriate migration method is selected that helps in gaining the understanding of the correct migration process for the organisation. The next stage that is associated with the migration of in house to the exchange online is the choice of the migration path (Katzer & Crawford, 2014). It could be the cutover migration to the staged migration where the cutover migration includes the copying of the emails from the on-premise exchange servers and it is copied in the cloud and the staged migration comprises of the similar method of migrating but the data and the mailbox are migration in the batches. The next stage in the simple migration involves the connecting of the exchange online to the email system. In this step, the privileges and the choice of the email addresses that would be migrated to the cloud are done. The next stage includes the testing of the email service. This is the main stage in the simple migration method as it provides the option of discovering any kind of issue that could be faced during the migration of the email addresses to the cloud (Mark, et al., 2016). The next stage after the execution of the tests on the server includes the activation of the licenses for every user, for allowing access to the mailboxes.

Task 4

PowerShell is used for hosting Office 365. There are several packages and the permissions that are utilised for managing Office 365 on the PowerShell. For gaining the list of the Office 365 users, the Get-MsolUser command is utilised. It retrieves the various users with a valid license in Office 365. For creating the new user, the New-MsolUser command could be utilised and along with the above commands the PowerShell script could be created for creating the multiple users in bulk (Charlebois-Laprade, 2014). The MsolUserPassword command is utilised for the changing or managing the password of the Office 365 users. The various groups in Office 365 could be managed using the PowerShell. For retrieving the list of all groups in Office 365, the command that could be utilised is the Get-MsolGroup. For adding any user to any group, the command that could be utilised is the Add-MsolGroupMember.

Task 5

The Office 365 includes a vast range of the services that include the Exchange Online, One Drive and the SharePoint Online for the business, the increases the collaboration and it also helps in fostering the communication among the users. For utilising the services of Office 365, moreover, each user requires their respective user account in Office 365 with the assigned licenses. Office 365 provides the opportunity of removing the licenses from the user accounts, which are no longer required and then re-assign to the other user accounts. The PowerShell could be used for managing Office 365 (Charlebois-Laprade, 2014). The initial stage connected with managing the accounts on Office 365 is connecting to Office 365 using PowerShell. Once the user is connected to the Office 365 using PowerShell, the accounts could be created of Office 365. The command that could be utilised for creating the account is the New-MsolUser -DisplayName “Employee Name Here” -FirstName FirstName -LastName LastName. The CSV files could be imported using Import-CSV. This script would create the user accounts and it also writes the new CSV file that lists all the new users along with passwords that had been automatically generated for these users that could be shared with the users.

The next stage is the assigning of the licenses to the users. The Get-MsolAccountSku cmdlet could be utilised for viewing the licensing plans and the presented licenses in the organisation and then utilise the Get-Msoluse for viewing the status of the licensing of all the users. For the assigning of the licenses, the Set-MsolUserLicense cmdlet could be utilised. $UsersWithoutALicense = Get-MsolUser -All –UnlicensedUsersOnly and $UsersWithoutALicense | for each {Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses “yourorgname: “} could be utilised for assigning the E3 licenses to all the users who are presently without any license. In this instance, it has been considered that the Office 365 tenant is the Microsoft Azure and the command for removing the individual user account from the Azure is Remove-AzureADUser -ObjectID <sign-in name>.

Works Cited

• Charlebois-Laprade, N., 2014. Managing Apps and Solutions Using PowerShell.. In Beginning PowerShell for SharePoint 2013, 1(5), pp. 113-138.
• Katzer, M. & Crawford, D., 2014. Office 365: Migrating and Managing Your Business in the Cloud.. Berkeley, CA.: Apress..
• Machado, M. & Bhoyar, G. P., 2017. PowerShell for Office 365.. s.l.:Packt Publishing Ltd.
• Mark, G. et al., 2016. Email duration, batching and self-interruption: Patterns of email use on productivity and stress. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 3(5), pp. 1717-1728.
• Taneja, S. & Taneja, M., 2014. A comparison of cloud based office productivity suites.. International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Applications, 2(6), pp. 1-11.