As I mentioned earlier in this course,
there are multiple admin centers that we can use to manage the
various workloads that make up Microsoft 365.
These admin centers are found in the bottom left.
If you are in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Now let's take a look at the Exchange Online admin center.
Exchange Online was the first workload that was added
to Microsoft 365,
way back when
it used to be called the Business Productivity Online Suite.
Exchange Online is the online version of the on-premises
product Exchange Server, which is one of the richest and
most evolved products from the Microsoft Back Office Suite.
Therefore, Microsoft Exchange Online is really a
complete product.
It has evolved and had feature parity between on-premises
and online for many,
many years.
But now the online version of Microsoft Exchange is far more
advanced than the on-premises solution.
So the tool that we use, the Exchange Admin Center,
looks a lot like the on-premises management tool.
So if you have experiences managing Exchange Server,
some of these functionalities and terminologies may seem to be very
familiar because they are. A lot of what you manage online and what
you manage on-premises is very similar,
with some minor differences and tweak to adapt for the cloud.
So the first thing we see in the Exchange Admin Center is
the list of recipients, essentially who can receive
email messages.
These recipients we will look at in detail in a later video
in this course.
But mailboxes are essentially what make up your users.
Groups is essentially groups of users or groups of mailboxes.
Resources are objects that we manage through Exchange Online,
such as a printer, a room, or a projector.
These are resources that can be scheduled and therefore managed
through Exchange Online.
Contacts are representations of external
recipients.
So when you need to include someone that is external to your
organization into your list of recipients,
you create a contact for them,
similarly to the way you would create a contact for a user
in your own mobile device.
Here in the Exchange Admin Center, I will then look at mail flow,
which is how mail flows in and out of our organization.
So we want to configure how emails are coming in,
how they're going out and what happens to them
while that transaction happens.
We can create rules that can configure what happens to email
messages when they go out.
Can they be manipulated in a certain way,
such as adding a footer to an email message,
or maybe encrypting an email message,
or adding information to email messages?
That's done through various rules.
Maybe we need to trace messages as they've gone in and out of our
organization using Message Trace.
So we will look at all of these functionalities a little bit later
on in this course. As well,
we have administration.
This is done through roles.
Of course, we assign administrative roles to users. As well,
we can control how users use Outlook web app,
the web version of Outlook, using policies.
Policies allow you to control how Outlook web app is being
accessed by your users.
We can configure mobile devices and control mobile devices,
such as what happens to email messages on mobile devices,
and which type of mobile devices can connect to mailboxes. As well,
we are able to manage public folders using the Exchange
Admin Center.
Public folders is a concept that has been around for
quite some time
in Exchange Online and, of course, Exchange on-premises.
Before that,
the ability to create essentially shared folders between Exchange
mailboxes in an exchange solution.
To do that, we create these public folders.
Public folders are stored in public folder mailboxes.
So we need to create mailboxes and then public folders after that.
It is probably one of the oldest standing features of Exchange
Server, public folders.
It's been around since the beginning. As well,
here we have settings that are organization-wide,
such as the ability to share or create a relationship with
another organization.
So these are the key settings and functionalities in the Exchange
Admin Center.
And we will look at many of these as we explore Exchange Online
throughout this course.