5 Office 365 Management Tools Every Microsoft Admin Should Consider
Microsoft 365 is a massive platform. What started its life as an offline business productivity suite has quickly evolved into one of the most complex cloud ecosystems for businesses of all sizes.
But, it also presents plenty of new challenges for system administrators. Between Office 365, Teams, Azure AD, OneDrive, and Exchange Online — Microsoft’s software infrastructure is often spread too thin, with more moving parts to configure than there are hours in a single day.
Admin Center, Microsoft’s built-in portal for tenant configuration and license management, can only go so far. But luckily, plenty of third-party developers have stepped in to fill the gaps where the original platform falls short.
Let’s take a look at some of the best Office 365 management tools available as of right now. These tools, whether built-in or third-party, can help you significantly reduce time spent fiddling with the platform by automating many day-to-day admin duties for Microsoft 365. They can help you reduce costs, save time, and simplify workflows all at the same time.
The Best Office 365 Management Tools: An Overview
Microsoft 365 Admin Center is a comprehensive portal that does a great job of allowing IT admins to fine-tune tenant configurations on a granular level.
Beyond the options to assign licenses, configure tenants, and manage users, Admin Center also provides centralized access to the different admin portals for Exchange, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Security, Compliance, Device Management, and Azure Active Directory.
But, there are thousands of configurations to set and monitor between all these different portals, making the job of a system administrator extremely difficult.
Third-party service providers like ShareGate and Veeam have since jumped in as a result, offering specific tools for system migration, configuration management, data backups, and more. These platforms automate crucial administrative tasks, helping users save both time and money when using Office 365.
Simeon Cloud: The Best End-to-End Office 365 Management Tool
As an Office 365 admin, you have to contend with thousands of settings spread across hundreds of screens between Exchange, Teams, Azure AD, Intune, and Microsoft Azure.
Whether you’re a seasoned cloud engineer or you’ve just migrated from an on-premises setup, configuring and maintaining all these different configurations between multiple portals can be an ongoing hassle.
Simeon Cloud is the only premium platform that automates configuration management for Microsoft 365.
Instead of having to spend hours writing Powershell scripts to automate management tasks, Simeon lets you easily set up your Microsoft tenants to align with data protection and legislative compliance best practices through a straightforward but intuitive admin dashboard.
Built categorically to help enterprise organizations in the midst of a digital transformation and managed service providers working with multiple clients, Simeon offers security baselines, Azure AD backup,, configuration monitoring, and application packaging for managing multiple tenants at scale.
Want to know more about how Simeon can help you manage your Office 365 setup? Sign up for a free demo to see for yourself!
CoreView: The Comprehensive Management Solution for Microsoft 365
CoreView serves as a comprehensive solution that simplifies this complexity. It provides a unified admin interface that consolidates all your Microsoft 365 data, offering features like Virtual Tenants for segmented administration and granular Role-Based Access Control for precise delegation of tasks.
The platform excels in automating administrative tasks, eliminating the need for complex PowerShell scripts. With CoreView, you can easily align your Microsoft tenants with data protection and legislative compliance best practices. It's particularly useful for enterprise organizations undergoing digital transformation and managed service providers handling multiple clients.
Lifecycle Insights: QBR Reports and Assessment for O365 MSPs
Quarterly Business Reports (QBRs) offer a strategic opportunity for managed service providers to communicate with company stakeholders on security risks and compliance posturing. Lifecycle Insights is a tool that helps you make the most of your QBRs by easily evaluating business risk by pulling data from multiple sources.
Lifecycle Insights is highly inspired by the continuous integration and development models and helps present information to stakeholders in a way that’s not complex or overwhelming.
Veeam: Data Backup and Recovery Tools for O365 and OneDrive
Veeam is a multi-platform cloud-based backup and recovery solution for small businesses, enterprise organizations, and service providers. It works with Google Cloud, Kubernetes, AWS, Salesforce, Azure, and Office 365.
Unlike Simeon, whose backup and recovery solutions are aimed at preserving configurations for system admins, Veeam backs up the actual files housed within your Office 365 setup. As of right now, Veeam’s backup solution covers Exchange, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams.
Atlas: The Modern Digital Workplace for Microsoft Teams Users
Microsoft offers plenty of tools to aid collaboration, but this is something for organizations who want to take it a step further. Atlas, by ClearPeople, is a digital workspace designed for modern collaboration. Its goal is to remove silos within your business to support working in a hybrid environment based around Microsoft 365.
Atlas is both a knowledge base and a collaboration tool, helping your team members connect with the right people over the most relevant company data right inside Microsoft Office 365.
How to Choose the Right Office 365 Management Tool?
The right tool or platform can help you streamline your Office 365 setup so that it meshes better with your organization’s systems. It can also help you automate tedious day-to-day tasks so that IT teams can focus on more important tasks.
But, choosing a platform that’s right for you starts with identifying your business workflows and evaluating areas for improvement.
If you’re looking for an end-to-end solution to help you prepare and manage your entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem, consider Simeon. Are you a managed service provider? Simeon Cloud provides leading MSP automation tools to help automate tedious and error-prone work.
Simeon Cloud was recently recommended by Microsoft in their latest article on phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication for Azure. However, Simeon’s functionality extends beyond Microsoft Azure and Azure AD to offer a truly cross-platform management software for Microsoft 365.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Simeon Cloud, including how it can help you make the most of Microsoft 365, sign up for a free demo. We’ll walk you through the exact ways that it can improve your Microsoft admin workflows with an interactive demonstration of all of Simeon’s features in action.
