Understanding a Center of Excellence (CoE)
A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a centralized team or organizational structure that provides leadership, best practices, research, support, and training in a specific area of focus. CoEs are designed to drive the adoption of new methodologies, improve skills, and ensure that the organization remains at the forefront of its industry. They serve as hubs of expertise and are critical in fostering innovation and maintaining high standards across the organization.

Core Features of a Center of Excellence

• Standardization: CoEs help establish standardized processes and practices across the organization. By developing and enforcing standards, CoEs ensure consistency and quality in the execution of projects and initiatives.
• Best Practices Repository: A CoE acts as a repository for best practices, methodologies, and tools. It collects, curates, and disseminates this knowledge throughout the organization, ensuring that all teams can benefit from proven strategies and techniques.
• Knowledge Sharing: One of the key roles of a CoE is to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across different departments and teams. This helps in breaking down silos and promotes a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
• Training and Development: CoEs are instrumental in providing specialized training programs and resources. They help in upskilling employees, ensuring that the organization has the necessary talent to meet its strategic goals.
• Innovation Hub: CoEs serve as catalysts for innovation. They encourage experimentation, support new ideas, and provide the necessary resources and expertise to turn innovative concepts into reality.

Benefits of Implementing a Center of Excellence

• Enhanced Efficiency: By standardizing processes and practices, CoEs help in streamlining operations and reducing redundancies. This leads to improved efficiency and productivity across the organization.
• Improved Quality: CoEs ensure that best practices are followed consistently, resulting in higher quality outcomes. This not only enhances the organization’s reputation but also leads to greater customer satisfaction.
• Cost Savings: Optimized processes and efficient resource utilization lead to significant cost savings. CoEs help in identifying areas of waste and implementing cost-effective solutions.
• Faster Time-to-Market: With standardized processes and a repository of best practices, CoEs enable quicker project execution and faster time-to-market for new products and services.
• Competitive Advantage: Through continuous improvement, innovation, and adherence to best practices, CoEs help organizations maintain a competitive edge in the market. They ensure that the organization remains agile and responsive to changing market dynamics.

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This section explains the different categories available to you to secure Office 365 services and data.

1. Managing Alerts

You can access the alerts section from the LHS panel available in the Office Security & Compliance widget as shown in the figure below.

Using Alerts an organization can configure and manage security alerts. A security admin can configure & manage alert policies. Alerts have the following options:

• Manage Alerts
• View Security Alerts
• Manage Advanced Alerts 

Security Alerts

Security Alerts can be configured to send out email notifications. You can also switch on Alerting with Advanced Security Management.

Advanced Security Management

Advanced Security Management includes:
• Threat detection: Helps you identify high-risk and abnormal usage, and security incidents.
• Enhanced control: Shapes your Office 365 environment leveraging granular controls and security policies.
• Discovery and insights: Delivers enhanced visibility into your Office 365 usage and shadow IT without installing an endpoint agent. 

2. Managing Permissions

Using Permission, you can assign permissions to people in your organization to perform tasks in the Security & Compliance Center. The Permission section is shown in the figure below.

While most permissions can be assigned with this feature, you’ll also need to use the Exchange admin center and SharePoint to set permissions for others.

Permissions in the Security & Compliance Center are based on the same Role Based Access Control (RBAC) permissions model that is used in Exchange Online. To access the Security & Compliance Center, users need to be a member of one or more Compliance Center role groups that are listed on the Permissions page.

The list shown in the figure below is of Security & Compliance Center role groups.

3. Understanding Classification & Labels

Classifications let you classify data using labels. You can classify data across your organization for governance, and enforce retention rules based on that classification. Under Classifications, you have three options as shown in the figure below.

Classifications can be used in different scenarios such as:

• Tax forms that need to be retained for a minimum period.
• Press materials that need to be permanently deleted when they reach a certain age.
• Competitive research that needs to be both retained and then permanently deleted.
• Work visas that must be marked as a record so that they can’t be edited or deleted.

Labels

Using Labels, you can perform the following tasks:
• Enable people in your organization to apply a label manually for their content in Outlook on the web, Outlook 2010 and later, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Office 365 groups. Users often know best what type of content they’re working with, so they can classify it and have the appropriate policy applied.
• Apply labels to content automatically if it matches specific conditions, such as when the content contains:
• Apply labels to specific types of sensitive information. This is available for content in SharePoint and OneDrive.
• Apply Specific keywords that match a query you create. This is available for content in Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office 365 groups.

This ability to apply labels automatically to the content is important because:
• Users need not be trained on all your classifications.
• No dependence on users to classify all content correctly. Users no longer need to know about data governance policies – they can instead focus on their work.
• Apply a default label to a document library in SharePoint and Office 365 group sites, so that all documents in that library get the default label.
• Implement records management across Office 365, including both email and documents. You can use a label to classify content as a record. When this happens, the label can’t be changed or removed, and the content can’t be edited or deleted.
• Create and manage labels on the Labels page in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center.
•Note that auto-apply labels require an Office 365 Enterprise E5 subscription.
 

4. Understanding Data Loss Prevention

Data Loss Prevention allows you to identify, monitor and protect sensitive information across the Office 365 platform. Data Loss Prevention offers three options as shown in the figure below.

To protect sensitive information and prevent its disclosure, the organization need to comply with several standards and industry regulations.
Examples of sensitive information are personally identifiable information (PII) like a medical record, social security information, etc. 

As per a Microsoft Article Data Loss Prevention can do the following things:
• Identify sensitive information across many locations, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business.
• Prevent any accidental sharing of sensitive information.
• Monitor and protect sensitive information in the desktop versions of Excel 2016, PowerPoint 2016, and Word 2016.
• Help users learn how to stay compliant without interrupting their workflow.View DLP reports showing content that matches your organization’s DLP policies. 

5. Understanding Data Governance

Data governance is all about keeping your data around when you need it and getting rid of it when you don’t. With data governance in Office 365, you can manage the full content lifecycle, from importing and storing data at the beginning, to create policies that retain and then permanently delete content at the end. Data governance has five options as shown in the figure below.

Apart from this using Data governance, you can also import email from other systems, enables archive mailboxes or set policies for retaining email and other content within your organization as explained below.
• Import – Lets you import PST files to exchange mailboxes. You can then use the Intelligent Import feature to filter the items in PST files that get imported to the target mailboxes.
• Archive – Lets you archive mailboxes to provide additional email storage for your office associates. You can use enable or disable a user’s archive mailbox.
• Retention – Lets you create a policy to retain what you want and get rid of what you don’t. While your organization may be required to retain content for a period of time because of compliance, legal, or other business requirements, keeping content longer than required might create unnecessary legal risk.
• Supervision – Lets you define policies that capture email and 3rd-party communications in your organization so they can be examined by internal or external reviewers. Reviewers can then classify these communications, make sure they’re compliant with your organization’s policies, and escalate questionable material if necessary.  

6. Understanding Threat Management

Threat management feature lets you protect your data. Following are some of the important functions of Threat Management.
• control and manage mobile device access to your organization’s data
• protect your organization from data loss
• protect inbound and outbound messages from malicious software and spam
• protect your domain’s reputation and to determine whether senders are maliciously spoofing accounts from your domain
Threat management offers two options as shown in the figure below.

The image below shows the options available in Office 365 for creating threat management policies:

7. Understanding Search & Investigation

Search & investigation lets you search through all the content of your organization. Everybody’s email, documents, Skype conversation history, everything really.
Some of the key things that can be done here are :
• Content Search : Lets you carry out a neatly ordered and automated version of the admin power-trip. You can search through all the content of your organization. Everybody’s email, documents, Skype conversation history, everything really.
• Audit Log Search : Lets you view all the actions in your Office 365 organization. Who accessed what, who shared what, which admin deleted that group. Every action is taken within Office 365 with a bunch of predefined result-filters.
• eDiscovery: Allows you to establish facts and prove something when you need it. Not only does it do the whole search of all the content, but also logs the actual search criteria so an investigator (read: non-it-admin, for instance, someone from the legal department) can not only produce the requested data, but also show how they acquired it. It also lets you delegate the searching for this data to a specific group of users (so legal can do it themselves without granting them uber-admin rights) and you can save the query so they can run it whenever they like (so no more ‘hey all that boring search-work you did for us last Friday, can you do that again, every Friday for the next 12 months or so?’).
· Productivity app discovery
 
8. Using Reports

Reports allow you to create a whole bunch of reports to help you understand how your organization is using Office 365. This includes reports related to auditing, device management, supervisory review, and data loss prevention. You can also view user activity reports such as sign-ins for SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Azure Active Directory.
Reports offer three sections as shown in the figure below.

9. Applying Service Assurance

Service assurance is used to access details of how Microsoft keeps Office 365 customer safe and meets industry compliance requirements. Following are few of the documents you can see here are:

• Microsoft security practices for customer data that is stored in Office 365.
• Independent third-party audit reports of Office 365.
• Implementation and testing details for security, privacy, and compliance controls that Office
365 uses to protect your data.
• You can also find out how Office 365 can help customers comply with standards, laws, and
regulations across industries, such as the:
• International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 and 27018
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)
• Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)

Conclusion

Above are some of the key points to manage information in a secure way using Office 365. If you’d like to learn more on this topic or are keen to get answers to some specific queries, feel free to write to us at emailid@domainname. To check more on customized solutions for Office 365 do visit our website http://aqltech.com.

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Getting Started

To understand the key features of security and compliance, open the widget available in the security & compliance center (SCC). The widget appears as shown in the image below.

Understanding the Security & Compliance Centre (SCC)

Security and Compliance Centre(SCC) is designed for admins to secure their Office 365 data & services and to meet their organizational compliance objectives. SCC lets you monitor the state of your service, track issues, and have a historical view of availability. The SCC dashboard looks as shown in the image below.

The LHS panel offers the following categories to secure your Office 365 services and data:
• Alerts
• Permissions
• Classifications
• Data Loss Prevention
• Data Governance
• threat Management
• Search & Investigation
• Reports
• Service Assurance

Listing Security & Compliance Center availability for different Office 365 plans

SCC has different business and enterprise plans. Following table lists the details of each plan.

Security & Compliance Center availability for Standalone plans

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1) Microsoft Forms

With Microsoft Forms, you can easily create Surveys and Polls to collect customer feedback, measure employee satisfaction and can even organize team events. Forms have replaced Excel-based surveys and build a live connection between Microsoft Forms and Excel. Microsoft Forms can also be accessed directly from Microsoft Teams.

Below is the screenshot of the Microsoft Forms screen from where we can create forms and quiz applications:-

Below is the screenshot showing how we can create a quiz application and can see the responses. Forms allow creating various types of question types like choice, text, date, etc.

2) PowerApps

PowerApps is an initiative by Microsoft that allows developers and nontechnical users to build mobile applications from selectable templates. … The objective of PowerApps is to enable business users to build new capabilities via apps, without requiring that they have code expertise.

PowerApps allows you to connect to multiple data sources, and not just Microsoft sources, things like Google, Salesforce, Facebook, GitHub, Azure, Dynamics, Bing, lots and lots of connectors. And they’re always adding more. With PowerApps you can create apps using templates.

PowerApps at its core is a Platform as a Service. It allows you to create Mobile Apps that run on Android, iOS, Windows (Modern Apps) – and with almost any Internet browser. PowerApps is also a mobile app! … It is essentially a container that makes mobile apps much easier to use across mobile platforms.

Below is the official PowerApps URL:-
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/

3)Microsoft Flows

With MS Flows, we can create automated flows between the apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data and many more. There are many different connectors available in Flows and one of them is SharePoint Online.

Below is the official Flow URL:-
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/

Practical Scenario: –
1) Create a survey/quiz in Microsoft Forms with different types of questions for the participants to register for an event. With this survey, participants could simply select their preference by dragging and dropping their preferences in order. We also collected food and dietary restrictions etc.
2) Now, this survey could be embedded on a SharePoint modern page, so that participants can also have SharePoint site experience.
3) Now the survey results can be captured in SharePoint using Microsoft Flows.
4) The results were saved in a SharePoint list, one answer per column, which helped quickly clarify the results, and allow for further integration opportunities. The flow will be fired every time a form is submitted.
5) Whenever a registration is done, an email is also sent to participant confirming them with their registration.
6) The PowerApp view is used to display the information to participants what they have registered for.
7) PowerApp is a single screen App which is based on the current context and it is very much user-friendly.

Summary:-
In this article, we saw how different Office 365 products like Forms, SharePoint, PowerApps and Flows can be leveraged to create business critical solutions. Start using these tools/products, however, don’t get confused with a large list of capabilities, start small and then deep dive!

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With Office 365 Group, Exchange online behind the scenes generates a mailbox with Group email address to send and receive mails openly with the members of the Group.
Once Office 365 Group is created, Office 365 behind the scenes starts linking related services like shared calendars, SharePoint modern team site, OneNote among others in the background.

Creating an Office 365 Group from Outlook

When Group is created on Outlook, the background worker process starts hitting the below tools to create their own features
1.SharePoint – A new site collection workspace is created with the Group Name. This can be customized by the team with all the functionalities including Lists, Libraries, Sites among others.

2. Microsoft Teams – New channel is created on the Teams. It is a chat-based collaboration platform allows the users to engage in the conversation.

3.Shared Email – An e-mail id is created for the Group. Any Group member or Group owner can make use of it and mail the Group users. It allows the members to use a Shared Outlook for the Group.

4.Calendar – Set up a meeting invite specifically for the group members through Group Calendar. This Shared calendar is a separate one from the actual Outlook calendar in the organization.

5.Yammer – It is the office version of Facebook that allows users to collaborate in the community environment. It allows users to reach the community level people on the Organisation level.

Types of Users in a Group
There are 3 types of users

• Group Owners
• Group members
• Guests

Group Owners: Group owners are the one who have the authority to add/edit/remove users from the Group.Group owner can manage the Shared outlook mail and conversations in the group.

Group Members: Group member can participate in the conversations, Planners, Teams and other collaborations. However, members will not be able to add/edit/delete the users from the Group. There can be upto 256 members in a group.

Guests: Guests are external users who are not part of the organisation. Guests use any email id other than our organisation account to access the Group. Owner can provide the level of access to SharePoint and other tools provided Office 365 admins allow other users in the tenant level.
Group owners cannot add the Guests if tenant level setting is disabled to allow external users.

Naming Policy:
Tenant Admins can create naming policies which is automatically applied when Group Owners create a group. There is also the option to create some custom naming policy including the use of block letters and special characters for Office 365 Groups. Below is an example

Group Expiration Policy:
From Azure Active Directory, an admin can set the expiration days for the Group so as to allow the group to expire automatically within a certain period. Once expiration period is met a renewal email is sent out to Group owner without owner renewal the Group is deleted. Nonetheless, the Group can be restored with in a period of 30 days after it has been deleted. Below is a snapshot of the expiration page.

The Owner gets a renewal mail and it mentions the expiry days for the Group.

Different types of Access to the Groups:
There are 2 different types of access levels namely private and public

Private level groups and their assets will be available exclusively to the set of group members internally. Others cannot access or join the Group without the Group owner permission.

Public level groups are shared across the tenant users. Anyone can join the group and the resources are available at the Public level.

Office 365 Group Classification:
Another feature of Office 365 Groups is classification which does not exist OOB and require a quick PowerShell to enable it. The advantage of enabling this classification is that the users can specify how sensitive the data is. There are various levels to the classification ranging from low to high.

After classification is set, it is visible on the team site like below.

Dynamic Membership:
Form Azure AD it is possible to specify dynamic membership rules so that new users are automatically added to a certain group. In the below case, AQL group has dynamic rules set for all the employees of the IT department to add them to the group automatically.

Outlook Group Apps:

This app is available on both Android Play Store and iOS App store. This app allows users to work extensively across all the application that are available in Office 365 Groups.

Microsoft set an announcement to retire this app on May 2018, but all the functionality of a group can be accessed from Outlook App

Benefits of Using Office 365 Groups:
Some of the benefits of Office 365 Groups include

• Instantly available making it easy to use across all Office platform
• Public by default, Groups allows users to discover and join without admin permission
• Easy to manage membership and permissions in one place both for end users and IT administrators
• Private groups provide controlled access to your group

Guest Access
It is easy configure guest access to a group.

Click on Add Members to open the below window

Guests will receive an email (refer below image)

Click on “Access files” to open other windows where users must enter a new password to access non-office 365 email account.

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