Announcing Microsoft 365 Lighthouse for Managed Service Providers serving small & medium customers
Published Sep 22 2020 07:58 AM 146K Views
Microsoft

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.

 

Picture1.png

 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. 

 

Picture2.png

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.

 

m365lighthouse.png

 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.

 

41 Comments
Brass Contributor

YES! I have been waiting for this as a partner dating all the way back to the early Windows Intune days back in 2012. With Azure Lighthouse, that has been really helpful but only helped with a portion of our customers' environments so this is going to be critical to provide true end-to-end monitoring and management across the Microsoft Cloud.

Copper Contributor

I might be being thick but where does one find the TPID to enter on the form for early access?

Microsoft

@PaulBarton based on your and a few other comments received, we have removed the requirement to enter TPID on the early access form.

Note - This change doesn't impact anyone who has already summited the form previously so no need to re-submit. Hopefully, makes it easier for those who are still to submit.

Deleted
Not applicable

As a CSP I would like to say - THANK YOU! :)

 

Happy Azure Stacking!

Brass Contributor

The death of the RMM can't come soon enough for security-conscious MSPs. Thank you, Microsoft!

Iron Contributor

Intune for MSP will be very interesting (to me) the day we can upload/ create a Win32 package in our MSP tenant only, then distribute the application as easy as with Microsoft Store for Business applications across multiple customer tenants.

  • Updating the Win32 app on our MSP tenant? Sure, that updates package for customer tenants as well.
  • Only thing handled in the customer tenants are assignments and adding the product to their Intune in the first place.
Copper Contributor

Hi there,

 

Are there any plans to allow on-premise Windows Servers with an Azure hybrid join to be visible inside lighthouse? It would be great to get AV management / visibility of Windows Servers in Lighthouse

 

Thanks

Copper Contributor

This is a great!

 

An MSP/CSP Dynamics 365/Power Platform app next would be great too or integration with it.

Copper Contributor

So this is feels like it’s going to be Microsoft Endpoint Manager for MSP’s. That's great if we sell Intune so we can manage and get insights into devices centrally. My concern is it doesn’t seem to have any focus on tenant level security. Is audit logging turned on, is MFA enabled and if other security defaults are turned on per tenant. I would be important to be able to get the Productivity score, Secure score and Compliance score per tenant in a single windows. Having this additional functionality would help us make sure we maintain secure tenants. 

Brass Contributor

This will be a great tool for Partners, I am looking forward to being able to get behind it and onboard some customers.   The ability to control multiple tenancies from a single pane is a game changer around 365.   It will ease so much administration time.

 

Would love to see this being integrated with PIM...

Copper Contributor

A welcomed announcement.

Copper Contributor

I’m really excited about this. We just started deploying InTune to Business Premium customers and within a week it has saved countless hours managing updates and deploying applications. I’m really hoping my application to the preview is approved.

 

Looking forward to seeing how this develops.

Copper Contributor

@Vivek Kumar We registered for the public preview but have many questions surrounding roadmap items for delegated access into M365 customers and running their security tools, like Office 365 DLP and MCAS. There are some ways to get there with Azure Lighthouse and Sentinel, but native hooks and proper delegation is paramount. Would love to chat more about where the solution falls down and what is coming in addition to the Intune pieces.

 

Microsoft

Thank you for the eagerness for Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, and the thoughtful comments here. We're making a note of the inputs here and will consider them during the development cycle. 

 

Due to overwhelming interest, we plan to invite partners to Microsoft 365 Lighthouse preview in phases. So if you responded to the early access survey, you're in line and someone from our team will reach out to you. 

Copper Contributor

I'm very excited about this new feature/portal and also happy that we are on the early access list for december. Looking forward using M365 Lighthouse 

Als the new tenant switcher works perfect and add lots of value; New organization switcher in the Microsoft 365 admin center - Microsoft Tech Community

Copper Contributor

Thanks a lot for the confirmation about early access to this preview. Really looking forward to that. We would like to add some tenants and subscriptions for testing. Will it be possible to change this when we get access to the preview program? 

Copper Contributor

The link aka.ms/LighthouseNextStep. is no longer taking any registration. I've been looking for a better management of M365.

Any other way to get started?

Copper Contributor

Do you have any indication of official release day of this.  We need to make certain decisions around other product offerings and the release date of this will play a significant role.  Any chance there is no up to date demo available?

I also would like to known about the release date? Does anyone have a clue about this one?

Copper Contributor

Are there any further updates, the preview places were filled pretty quickly, how do we get invited. We are building a Microsoft focused Security Practice to complement our MSP services.

Copper Contributor

Really looking forward to seeing this. 

Copper Contributor

I have received my invite for the trial but the activation link is not working.  Microsoft Support have not come back to me yet on how to resolve this.  Is there someone on the team I can contact directly?

Brass Contributor

Are there any updates about the availability of Microsoft 365 lighthouse? I mist out on the preview registration.:sad:

Copper Contributor

Dear all,

I received the invitation, which is great. are there any best practises? should this be setup in our company environment, or in a separate MSP environment?

 

regards,

Gerard

Silver Contributor

@Vivek Kumar can you please provide some responses to the questions. Its not good to ghost us 

Copper Contributor

Really looking forward to this feature. We did enroll in the preview but never heard from it since. Is there any update available?

 

Copper Contributor

I would also like to know if there is an update available. 

Microsoft

Thank you for the continued interest in Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. The survey link was closed late last year with overwhelming number of signups. We've been slowly inviting more and more partners into the preview to try the solution and give us feedback. If you responded to the survey, you're in line and someone from our team will reach out to you. We'll continue to be in this mode of iterative development for some more months to get increasing partner participation and feedback towards getting this new service primed for broad availability. 

Copper Contributor

Hello Vivek, 

 

I am starting a brand new MSP division in an existing company. As such, this would be an ideal opportunity to start using this in a greenfield scenario without any existing software. The sign-up is currently over but I would love to chat about using this as soon as the invites are again being made.

 

 

Copper Contributor

Hi @dbeutler - you can use Simeon Cloud to deploy Intune, Azure AD and O365 configurations in bulk across tenants from a baseline template saved as configuration as code. This is the best solution out there. Cheers.

Copper Contributor

Hey David, I appreciate the advice. I have reached out to them for a demo. 

Thanks!

Brass Contributor

Any news? :)

Copper Contributor

I'm greeted with the following when I browse to https://lighthouse.microsoft.com/#home

I have not received any Lighthouse related emails.

2021-04-19 14_33_58-Home - Microsoft 365 Lighthouse and 10 more pages - Work - Microsoft​ Edge.png

Copper Contributor

Hi RyanDCCI,

I have the same message with no email.

 

Brass Contributor

Hi RyanDCCI,

Same here. Have this message for a while now, but no mail to be found anywhere. I contacted MS support but they told me just to be patient.

Brass Contributor

Hi,

 

Will this work with the 365 E5 license?

What actual permissions are required via delegated rights to allow the right access to this portal.

 

Many thanks,

 

Tim

Copper Contributor

Any news on when this will get to public preview?

Copper Contributor

This is going to be great relief for MSP's but would be great if released sooner to GA.

Brass Contributor
Brass Contributor
Brass Contributor

That's cool, I'm looking forward to the tool that lets us review license utilization and all the secure scores + productivity score in one place for all customers so account managers can run a client review without pulling content from 5+ portals.

Version history
Last update:
‎Oct 08 2020 09:53 AM
Updated by: