Saturday, August 9, 2014

System Center Office 365 Management Pack

There is a new feature which is on the Office 365 public roadmap called “System Center Office 365 Management Pack” (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/office-365-roadmap-FX104343353.aspx) which I am excited to see.

This is something a lot Office 365 customers will be excited to see because they want to have Office 365 “monitored” holistically across their enterprise. Today organizations have to System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor their entire organization, however they have no way to get feeds from Office 365. This results in them having to go to the Office 365 Administration Center and rely on RSS feeds for notification and messages. Additionally if you are an organization that may have multiple Office 365 tenants you will be able to consume status on all of your tenants.

With the System Center Office 365 Management Pack this will change. With management pack organizations will be able to get the following:

  • Subscription health
  • Service status
  • Active/resolved incidents
  • Message center communications

All of this information is readily available through the Office 365 Administration Portal but will be able as well through a SCOM Pack. Now organizations can notified of health, status, incidents and change through SCOM and if the organization already has existing business process to handle these events, Office 365 can plugged into those existing business processes.

Here is a guide on the new Management Pack - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43708.

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