Do you even 365 bro?
Is it possible to be an “Expert Generalist”?
In today’s crazy cloud first world, we have to wear multiple hats. IT Pro’s find themselves in a bit of a quandary.
Everything is so intertwined that we have to at least know about the existence of a product that is somehow integrated with the product that we supposed to support or work with.
Disclaimer: This is not a post about Microsoft Teams. It is however one of those products that utilize other product features.
Exhibit A:
The latest Microsoft Teams exam, MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams; currently in beta is a perfect example of where the world is at. Here’s an excerpt from the overview:
Candidates for this exam should be proficient at managing Teams settings by using PowerShell. The Teams Administrator has a fundamental understanding of integration points with apps and services, including but not limited to SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Exchange, Azure AD, and Office 365 Groups. The Teams Administrator understands how to integrate external apps and services.
Just look at the things you need to know about to take the exam.
Guys like Matt Wade dropped the best explanation of what Office 365 is in his Periodic Table. I’m a bit of a fanboy cos I’m sure I’ve referenced his stuff repeatedly since v1.
So what do you really need to know when “delving” into Office 365 as an IT Pro? Well I like to keep things simple and in English because it makes it easier to understand:
- Identity
- Security
- Desktop
- Collaboration
- File-sharing
- Instant Messaging
- Calling/Telephony
- Corporate Portal
- Productivity
- Social
In the old days, circa “The cloud” we would have had a team of architects thinking and worrying about the above. The firewall/security person did not worry about how to make calls. All he/she knew about was that a port was required to be opened for stuff and so forth so on. Added to that, these things had boundaries and operated independently from one another.
Enter Teams: [For it to work properly]
You need SharePoint for “group” files, OneDrive (The other SharePoint) for 1:1 files, an O365 Group for permissions, Stream for video, etc.
How much do you need to know???
At the same time, you no longer have to worry about having, what I like to call “industrial grade” knowledge about things. How sensitive was the User Profile Service? Even looking at it funny broke the damn thing. Like an off-meds Jack Russell with a personality disorder. I mean really, the only person that could manage the tantrums that UPS threw all the time was Spencer Harbar. Every SharePoint person secretly loves SharePoint Online for that exact reason. We do not have to worry about a ton of things. Everything just works in the cloud. And with that comes the other problem.
We do not know enough…
And I’ll go back to the Teams cert; has a fundamental understanding. What mere mortal, does that even mean?
Let me hypothesize for a moment. At the beginning of the post, I listed what I felt IT Pro’s need to know about, so that they can manage Office 365. The first one was Identity. This is generally handled by Azure Active Directory (On the back-end because there is user management in the M365 Admin Center). Do you need to know about things like what Privileged Identity Management is in AAD or even something like AAD Application Proxy?
Where is the line, is there a line and who decides when the line is drawn?? And this is the conundrum that new IT Pro’s face. Where do they in fact start, and where does it end? When speaking to people like Loryan Strant he will tell you, that you need to know everything as not everyone is given specific roles. e.g. An Exchange Administrator Role would be for admins that only worry about mail and they will never have to worry about guest access in Teams.
But what about that sub-300 user organisation. The one that has 1 senior admin person and maybe 2–3 helpdesk peeps taking calls about mice not working and resetting passwords.
What I have seen here is the lack of depth. Which in-turn creates some amazing scenario’s that quite frankly scares me. Here’s an example:
A small organisation of sub-300 users decided to move to the cloud. They had a lot of content (files) that was on a file server that would be moved to SharePoint Online. Because these files have hyperlinks to other documents, naturally the links would not work in the cloud. They did however migrate the content to SharePoint, BUT then spun up a few virtual machines, deployed the OneDrive sync client, used the sync client to “download” the SharePoint libraries to a storage space, mapped the synced content back to a shared drive and then mapped that network drive back to the users. Now technically, this works for the most part, but architecturally its not very good, as OneDrive was not designed for service account syncing, (There are products that handle file syncing across different products) and invariably, locked files happen when a user accesses the file from the network drive and another user hits the same file via SharePoint.
And this is what invariably happens when there is not enough depth learnt/experienced with the products because there’s just too much for one person to know.
My point is, and it doesn’t matter if you are new to Office 365, migrating to Office 365 or using Office 365; if you are unsure about how things work, do your research. Ask a friend, attend your local usergroup, join a Facebook group, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, head over to Microsoft Learn, the list is endless. Hell, you can even pay for advisory services from Microsoft partners. There are so many ways to up your 365 game.
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Be cool my ninjas.
