Office 365 Automation Solution

Office 365 saves companies the headaches of operating Exchange, SharePoint and Teams infrastructure. However, the management of users and permissions is still laborious; from creating users, to adding users to groups, assigning a license, to disabling a user.

Office 365 Management requires senior staff who have the necessary systems access and expertise to perform the actions, ultimately skilled employees spend too much time on administrative tasks and too little time on the strategic projects that generate business value. How can IT teams overcome these obstacles and free skilled employees from mundane, Office365 processes? The key is to provide a self-service interface for anyone to submit requests.

With I.T. Security in the forefront of everyone’s minds today giving team leaders and managers access to create their own users and allocate licenses for Office 365 is a challenge that requires careful balancing between providing the right facilities to end users, and compromising the security or integrity of your configuration. With companies increasingly looking for Automation to improve consistency and supportability, along with the self-service facilities to reduce the workload on the heavily utilised service desk and front-line support teams, we have built the Office 365 Solution for Azure Automation. The solution provides a self-service interface for submitting requests and an automation platform that executes the Office 365 Management requests in minutes. This can all be tied in to your an existing change management approval process.

Users are provided the rights to access portal services via Active Directory group membership, but these rights are isolated from Office 365, so its simple to provide portal facilities without providing rights to directly manage users and licenses.

All of the actions against the Office 365 system are carried out by your Azure Automation account, so every change is logged and carried out in a consistent way. All of the data that drives the requests in the automation portal is discovered and maintained by the Azure Automation runbooks, so the automation portal is always in sync with the Office 365 management experience.

The Runbooks have been written using the Runbook Studio authoring application and leverage the integration and smart discovery capabilities provided by the Integration Module for SQL Server. You simply create an account within your Office 365 subscription that Azure Automation can use to discover data and manage your accounts. Once the Solution is deployed start the discovery runbooks and you are in action!

The solution includes the following offerings, it forms an easy to extend framework that you can use to continue your automation journey.

Solution Features:
• Add Group members
• Add Team Member
• Add User to Groups
• Apply Team Security Policy
• Assign a license
• Create a Team
• Create Group
• Create Office 365 Distribution Group
• Create Office 365 Shared Mailbox
• Create Office 365 User
• Delete User
• Disable Login
• Disable Office 365 Litigation
• Enable Office 365 Litigation
• Enable User
• Modify an Office 365 Service
• Remove a License
• Remove a Team
• Remove Group Members
• Remove Team Member
• Remove User from Groups
• Reset Password
• Restore a user
• Set User Region