EasyLife 365 Mail 101
EasyLife 365 Mail 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 Mail 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 Admin.
The life cycle management of Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes, equipment and room mailboxes, and distribution lists 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 Admin 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, by configuring the templates based on your needs, you can control how a Microsoft 365 Distribution List is provisioned with settings controlling whether it is open or closed for anyone to join or requires approvals, as well which domains are available when end-users are creating distribution lists based on the template. A template defines all the aspects relevant to a resource such as:
- What type of resource is being provisioned? For example: Shared Mailbox, Distribution List
- Which domains are available when creating shared mailboxes, equipment and room mailboxes, and distribution lists based on this template?
- 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 provisioned?
The templates are maintained in the Templates section of the EasyLife 365 Admin.
The remaining resource life cycle is managed with the EasyLife 365 Mail policies. Policies allow to control how the resources are managed with regards to ownership, explicit confirmation, and access review. Policies can be applied to individual templates allowing you to have different behavior (for example different ownership requirements).
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 EasyLife 365 Mail deployment).
Policies are enforced by the EasyLife 365 Mail 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 Mail Engine triggers the necessary workflows in the background using the notification mechanisms.
Users use the integrated Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook application named EasyLife 365 Mail to create new resources in the Wizard. The Wizard is customizable through templates as well. The EasyLife 365 Mail Engine notifies users if they need to act (e.g. if a Shared Mailbox does not fit a defined policy. For example, if it does not have enough owners specified). All the actions required to make the necessary changes can be performed under the Shared Mailboxes, Distribution Lists and Resources menus in the EasyLife 365 Mail App.
Managing Synchronized On-Premise Resources
In Microsoft Exchange, Synchronized On-Premise Resources refer to distribution list; shared, room and equipment mailboxes that exist on your local on-premises Exchange server and are synchronized with Exchange Online in a hybrid deployment. Due to this hybrid nature, these resources are primarily managed on-premise, with limited management through Microsoft Exchange Online.
EasyLife 365 Mail extends full support for cloud-only resources while presenting certain restrictions for synchronized resources. Distribution lists, for instance, are accessible in a view-only mode; and shared, room, and equipment mailboxes offer comprehensive management functions, except for deletion operations.
EasyLife 365 Mail presents you with a banner providing notification that you are currently looking at an on-premise resource and you will have limited management features.
