Today we are announcing Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, a new experience that makes it easier for IT Partners to deliver managed services at scale to small and medium-sized customers.
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse will help you reduce your operational overhead by enabling you to onboard, monitor and manage your Microsoft 365 customers from one place. Moreover, you will be able to drive higher levels of standardization, automation, and auditing in how you work with customers.
Lighthouse is currently in private preview stage of development, and includes multi-tenant management capabilities for device compliance, threat management and user access management. To request early access to the public preview coming in first part of next year, register at aka.ms/LighthouseNextStep.
Let’s take a sneak peek at what’s coming.
Standardizing device compliance
First, Lighthouse will enable monitoring and management of device compliance across your customers from one place. With this capability, you can understand what policies are in place, review the status of devices across customers, and compare these across customers.
This helps you work toward standardization so you can manage your customer base efficiently at scale.
Monitor and manage device compliance across customers from one place
Managing threats and antivirus protection
Second, Lighthouse includes threat management capabilities that let you see the protection status of Microsoft Defender Antivirus across all Windows 10 devices under management. With this, you will have one place to see which devices in your business are running Defender Antivirus, whether those are up to date, whether they have any active threats, and where an action – such as a reboot, required update, or overdue scan – is needed. You will also be able to view active threats in your environment, understand which users and devices are affected by them, which of these were blocked or quarantined, and where a review is needed.
This will help you reduce the operational burden of checking each PC one-by-one to verify all devices are protected and see if any needs action.
Manage devices and active threats across customers from one place
Simplifying user access management
Third, Lighthouse simplifies and automates user access management. You can view a single list of all the users you manage across your customers, so you can quickly perform common but time-consuming tasks—reset a password, block access, assign a license, delegate access to a mailbox or OneDrive, change group membership—without having to log in and log out of individual customer tenants. Lighthouse will also provide insights into risky sign-ins and show conditional access policy settings across customers.
All of this is available in a way that is clearly auditable and that the actions performed are traceable.
Other capabilities under development
Another capability we are currently exploring is helping you understand the adoption status of Microsoft 365 services across your customers, so you can help them get the most out of what they’ve paid for.
All of these new Lighthouse capabilities build upon the general multi-tenant capabilities being added to the Microsoft 365 admin center for customers and partners – including viewing service health and service requests across multiple tenants, and ability to quickly toggle between tenants.
Get involved in the development process
Lighthouse is currently in private preview stage of development – with IT technicians from several Managed Service Providers (MSPs) using it every day.
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse homepage available in private preview
To see a demo of Microsoft 365 Lighthouse by our engineering leads and hear from a few IT partners previewing Lighthouse on where they’ve found most value in it, watch the following the video or join this Ignite on-demand session [OD256]:
You can register at aka.ms/LighthouseNextStep to request early access to the public preview coming in the first part of next year and participate with us in the development of this exciting new set of capabilities.