Forum Discussion
Bitshaker1220
May 10, 2019Copper Contributor
How to document settings and changes in Office 365
Hello Community!
how do you document your settings and changes you made in Office 365?
Companies above a certain size must document here IT environment in documents (operations guide).
How do you make this?
Is there any (reporting) tool, which can read out any custom made settings in Office 365 or some think else?
Many greetings,
Thorsten
- Dean_GrossSilver Contributor
Bitshaker1220 as already mentioned, this is going to be a challenge. Some of the Admin settings can be read with PowerShell, but many do not have any type of public API so this becomes impossible to do for everything.
Many changes are available in O365 Audit Log, but many are not.
Your best bet will be to identify very specific monitoring requirements and prioritize them.
- Bitshaker1220Copper Contributor
Thank you Dean_Gross!
May be its a possibility. But not what we are searching.
We are searching for a "egg-laying wool milk sow" :-)
(I dont know, if this is the right translation for "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau")
Do anybody knows Docusnap, which is (or should be) a inventorying tool?
https://www.docusnap.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/DocusnapX_Office365_EN.pdf
Many greetings,
Thorsten
- Dean_GrossSilver Contributor
I think that translation is way off :), you probably meant something closer to "can do everything, also known as "Jack of All Trades", or a "Swiss Army Knife", i.e., one tool that does it all.
When i read the documentation for that tool, it seems very limited. There are many settings that it does not include.
In my experience, such organizations need to get their heads out of the sand and realize what O365 is, namely a SaaS where we all are just end users. And Microsoft can make any change they want, at any time, revert it and so on. So ITIL practices don't really apply.
But to answer your question as it's a somewhat common request, yes, there are some products out there that do a (limited) inventory of a tenant and/or can compare settings across multiple tenants. You can of course do it yourself via PowerShell, the Graph API and the corresponding admin endpoints for whichever of the dozen or so O365/M365 workloads you are interested in.
- AFAIK, there is not such a tool builtin in Office 365, but there is an ongoing project that migh interest you: https://github.com/Microsoft/Office365DSC
- Bitshaker1220Copper Contributor
Hi jcgonzalezmartin,
thank you for your answer! Office365DSC runs in the right direction. But its first in Alpha state, so I'm searching for a solution for a productive environment.
Many greetings,
Thorsten