Microsoft is a fundamental force in nearly every business around the world. The company’s pervasiveness attracts some 20,000 attendees to the Microsoft Inspire partner conference each year alone. Everyone is eager to see what’s on the Microsoft roadmap. As Microsoft partners, we all want to dovetail with the company’s plans and help businesses of all sizes get the most from their Microsoft products and services.

That’s why we’ll be demonstrating the Nuvolex SaaS application management platform at Inspire 2018: we’ve figured out how to radically simplify the provisioning and daily administration of leading SaaS applications, starting with Microsoft Office 365. If you’re a cloud service provider supporting large numbers of Office 365 customers, you know that this is a complicated problem to solve. But we’ve done it, using some serious automation and by integrating all your tenants and administration tasks into a single, intuitive management portal.

On-Prem Capabilities Mirrored for SaaS

As you know, Microsoft has well-defined rules and structures for managing its on-premise applications. However, when Microsoft extended its applications into the cloud, many of those management conventions disappeared.  That left many IT administrators and Help Desks at a loss for how to efficiently manage large volumes of Office 365 tenants, users, admin access rights, workloads, and licenses—and to do it in a way that avoids costly escalations to higher-level IT personnel.

So Nuvolex created an Office 365 management portal that restores those Microsoft administrative conventions for you. Now, you can manage all aspects of your Office 365 deployment exactly as you would manage them on-prem.

In fact, we don’t care whether your user identities are sourced on prem or in the cloud; you can manage everyone the same way from our integrated portal. That includes delegating administrator rights using role types that you create based on what makes sense for your business—not being force-fit into a few basic out-of-the-box roles. And you don’t have to do any work to consolidate Office 365 tenants or AD domains or migrate user objects to the cloud to ease daily administration.

Avoid ‘A Portal Here, a Portal There’

Microsoft, like other SaaS providers, does provide a management portal of its own that you can use to perform basic Office 365 administration tasks. When you get to about 500 users, however, the portal runs out of steam. You either have to administer users and licenses one at a time—which in large installations could require additional IT headcount—or write complex PowerShell scripts to automate bulk processes. Depending on your business, you might not have the time, talent, or desire to write scripts to automate tasks and enable bulk transactions.|

So we’ve done all that for you.

Our portal, by the way, isn’t limited to managing Office 365. As your SaaS deployments expand to include additional services from Microsoft and other SaaS providers, you can use it in the same way to manage those apps. All with a single security credential. We’re thinking ahead, trying to spare you the pain of having to log in and out of multiple management portals all day as you attempt to administer multiple tenants with large installed bases of SaaS apps.

SaaS is the software consumption model of the future; Gartner says that SaaS is currently enjoying a 20 percent-per-year growth rate. So your customers’ SaaS populations are only going to grow. Trying to gain visibility into all your SaaS populations and administering them one at a time going forward just isn’t going to scale.

You need heavy IT service automation and deep integrations to get the job done, and we’ve already done the work for you. Learn more by reading our solution brief for CSPs, or schedule a demo by contacting us at sales@nuvolex.com.