This post comes from PTG Project Engineer and Office 365 administrator, Matt Banning.
Between vacation and being onsite at our clients' offices, I've been out of the office a lot recently. Luckily, using the “Office 365 Admin” app, I've been able to keep myself knowledgeable about my Office 365 environment.
This app lets me monitor the service health of my Office 365 environment by sending me push notifications about any service related issues. It provides a brief description of the issue, periodic updates, any workarounds, and an estimated time to resolution.
Getting a push notification when a service starts to have issues allows me to be proactive rather than reactive. Often, I’ve called and alerted the customer to the issue, and what we're doing to fix it, before they're even aware of the issue.
In addition to reporting, the app also provides a lot of information - my favorite being the user section. It displays the contact information for all of your users, making it easier to contact them when an issue comes up. It's even more helpful when it comes to licensing. It provides an overview of all the licensing within your organization and the gives you the ability to change a user's license directly from the app.
Some of the other helpful information it provides includes:
- The overall health of each services within Office 365 (Exchange, Sharepoint, etc). The health statuses include health, degraded, outage and investigating.
- The message section displays any tickets you have with Microsoft - open or closed.
This app was originally intended for system administrators and IT professionals. But for any Office 365 administrator, no matter your level of expertise. I highly recommend it for staying up to date on your service health, especially if you're out of the office frequently.
