Office 365 Management Tools

Office 365 management is performed through a Web portal that enables creation, migration, management, and licensing of Office 365 user accounts, whether the accounts are local to Office 365 or linked to an on-premises Active Directory (AD) instance using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) 2.0. In addition to account and license administration, the portal allows for the creation of security groups (similar to Windows security groups) for administration purposes. The portal also links to administration portals for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online, each of which opens in a separate tab and manages each service individually, with varying degrees of management capability. Each administration portal has different browser requirements, although Microsoft denotes the browsers supported by each. Exchange Online, with the closest feature parity to its on-premises version, has the most capable management functionality. SharePoint features a portal that is relatively limited in capability, and Lync features a portal that currently is limited to management of federation, connectivity to Windows Live public instant messaging, and Lync user attribute management.