EasyLife 365 101
EasyLife 365 uses the Microsoft Identity Platform to manage the authorization and authentication layer against your Microsoft 365 tenant. Your Microsoft 365 administrator will consent permissions to either the multi-tenant application identities managed in the EasyLife 365 SaaS or to a dedicated application identity registered in your tenant. Once the permissions to your tenant have been consented you can start configuring the behavior of the EasyLife 365 suite using the EasyLife 365 Collaboration Cockpit.
The life cycle management of a Microsoft 365 resource supported by EasyLife 365 starts from the creation status, goes over the usage status, and finally transitions to the clean-up status of the Microsoft 365 resources. EasyLife 365 ensures that the ownership of resources in the organization remains tracked. EasyLife 365 triggers workflows and interacts with the resource owners in case there are compliance issues that do not meet your organizational criteria configured in the EasyLife 365 Collaboration Cockpit policies.
EasyLife 365 allows you to create resource templates. These templates define who in your organization can request new resources and how these are configured during the provisioning process. For example, you can control how a Microsoft 365 Team is provisioned with its dedicated channels and guest sharing settings by configuring the templates based to your needs. A template defines all the aspects relevant to a resource such as:
- How is the template provisioned?
- What are the naming conventions when creating a new resource?
- What security features are enabled? For example: guest account access, Teams settings
- What type of resource is being provisioned? For example: Microsoft 365 Group, Team, Viva Engage.
- What data is being collected from the users?
- What policy is being applied?
- Which users (audience) can consume this template?
- Is this template enabled for your users?
- What webhooks are triggered once a new resource is being provisioned?
The templates are being maintained in the Templates section of the EasyLife 365 Collaboration Cockpit. The remaining resource life cycle is managed with the EasyLife 365 policies. Policies allow to control how the resources are managed with regards to ownership, expiration, explicit confirmation, and access review. Policies can be applied to individual templates allowing you to have different behavior (for example different expiration periods).
You might want to have different expiration policies depending if the template is intended for short-term or long-term collaboration. You might want to have more aggressive access reviews for templates that allow access from guest accounts.
On top of that, you can also define a default policy. The default policy is applied to all resources without a valid policy (e.g. resources provisioned prior to the Easy Life deployment). Policies are enforced by the EasyLife 365 Collaboration Engine. This is a background-process that runs every day and ensures that the rules are applied to your resources. If something is not behaving as expected, EasyLife 365 Collaboration Engine triggers the necessary workflows in the background using the notification settings.
Users use the integrated Teams application named EasyLife 365 Collaboration App to create new resources in the Wizard. The Wizard is customizable through templates as well. The EasyLife 365 Collaboration Engine notifies users if they need to act (e.g. if a team does not fit a defined policy). All the actions required to make the necessary changes can be performed under MyStuff in the EasyLife 365 Collaboration App.