Top 10 Office 365 Help Desk Requests for 2019

With the end of the year nipping at our heels, many may find themselves in moments of reflection for what has occurred during this year, or perhaps even this decade. Now if that intro sounds very similar to our previous top 10 article, it’s because it is as truthful now as it has ever been. Organizations today require a tremendous amount of administration and oversight, and those growing needs reflect in the advents of technology. Microsoft in general has done a great job of looking at the needs of today’s organization and providing compatible technology depending on the required workflow. But what does it take to support that technology and the organization as a whole? At MessageOps, we have toiled to find ways to quickly resolve issues through our complimentary support services that are included with the Microsoft CSP program.

Below are the top 10 ticket categories that our Microsoft Office 365 service desk have performed troubleshooting and resolved throughout 2019:

1.  Office 365 Administration

Just like the last few years, Microsoft Administration is the number one requested support item by our services desk. We believe there are a couple reasons that this stands true. First, Microsoft is constantly updating this platform. That is the double-edged nature of the cloud. It is ever evolving and updating to meet the needs of today’s administrator, but with that comes feature updates that may not be fully baked or documented within Microsoft’s TechNet. The administrators essentially come upon new features, or possibly the removal of old legacy features and aren’t sure what to do next.

The second reason is many of the legacy features mentioned previously are moved to new Admin Centers by Microsoft. For example, eDiscovery was selectable within the Exchange Admin Center, but now you are told to go to the Security & Compliance Center. Also, the Security & Compliance Center was then split into two separate admin centers, one called “Security” and one called “Compliance”.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• PowerShell script requests
• User Mailbox administration
• SMTP Connectors
• Transport Rules
• Mail Forwarding
• Office 365, Distribution, Dynamic Distribution and Security Groups
• Shared and Resource Mailboxes
• Reporting and Mailbox Auditing
• Password Policies and MFA
• Archiving
• Retention Policies
• Litigation Hold
• eDiscovery Content Search
• Restore Mailboxes

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2.  Office 365 Security

As with the previous year, Office 365 Security had the second most service requests in our queue. Microsoft has taken many strides in the past few years to increase security and reduce vulnerability at the tenant-level. The inclusion of Secure Score that provides a daily tally of your security posture, as well as new and more secure versions of multi-factor authentication in the form of Conditional Access Policies are now available. Other tools like Advanced Threat Protection help to protect mail from malicious URLs and attachments.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• Compromised user mailboxes
• Spoofed email
• Phishing email
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC records
• Advanced Threat Protection (P1 and P2)
• Spam Filtering
• Content Filtering
• DLP (Data Loss Prevention) Policies
• SCL (Spam Confidence Level) and BCL (Bulk Confidence Level) filtering
• Mailbox Auditing
• External Forward Identification
• Risky Sign-ins
• Multi-Factor Authentication
• Message Tracy and Header review
• Users unable to send externally (blocked)
• Mail going to quarantine
• NDR or bounce-backs
• Allow or block specific domains
• Tenant unable to send or receive mail

With Inscape365, you can also improve your security posture.

3.  Office 365 Pro Plus

No matter how much technology improves, software support will always be one of the top generators of any service desk. With the recent update to Office 2019, this is still the trend. Out of all the software the Office suite provides, it is still the Outlook application that tends to be the big kahuna of support. This can be for many reasons. Connectivity, slowness, inability to search and plug-in issues are just a few to name. These can also be some of the hardest tickets to resolve as local factors such as network, third-party software or plug-ins may be the cause or catalyst of the problem.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• Outlook 2013, 2016 and 2019 application issues
• Outlook third-party plug-ins
• Inconsistencies between OWA and Outlook (folders or mail)
• Credentials not accepted
• Multi-factor authentication app password not syncing
• Auto-complete issues
• Indexing issues
• Inbox rules
• Installation issues with Office Pro Plus
• Licensing issues with Office Pro Plus

4.  Microsoft Azure

When Office 365 was first released as BPOS about 10 years ago, Microsoft had a clever plan to get as many people into their cloud as possible. They did this by starting with e-mail, a technology virtually every company uses. They planted the seeds that cloud computing was a very real factor for their business. Office 365 in a sense, gave most organizations a taste of saying goodbye to on-premise infrastructure. It is no wonder that Microsoft Azure consumption has skyrocketed this year. Now that people have dipped their preverbal toe into the cloud and didn’t lose it, they are ready to jump in headfirst. Because of this, it is no surprise that a dramatic rise in service desk tickets followed with the increased consumption.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• Subscription creation and owner assignment (IAM)
• Virtual machine creation and troubleshooting
• Virtual network creation and troubleshooting
• Azure Backup creation and troubleshooting
• Point-to-Site and Point-to-Point VPN creation
• Azure Classic to Azure ARM migrations
• Region capacity issues
• vCPU quota increases
• SQL PaaS issues

5.  Azure AD

Identity management, whether that is active directory on-premise or Azure AD in the cloud, is the life blood for almost all organizations. This is what allows user accounts to authenticate to the appropriate resources needed to perform their day to day activities. With many clients, they may want to have the ability to only have a single password used on both their on-premise equipment as well as Office 365 resources. Others may want a single sign-on experience where a password never prompts at all. The setups for these can get complicated and questions and inquiries do come frequently to our service desk.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• Azure AD Connect Setup
• Duplicate User Removal
• SMTP soft and hard matching
• Conditional Access policy review and setups
• External or guest user access
• Self-service password reset setup
• Passthrough Authentication setup
• Single Sign-On setup
• User attributes not synching with AD Connect
• Sync service stops running on AD Connect

6.  Teams

As predicted last year, Teams has quickly outpaced Skype for Business as the go to collaboration product this year. At Microsoft Ignite last month, they announced that Teams is actually the fastest adopted product in Microsoft history. Considering the amount of highly popular products Microsoft has produced for decades, that is quite the claim. But after using the product, it is easy to see why people are moving to it in droves. The ability to instant message, share documents, create private or public channels and work on documents directly from the Teams interface shows the versatility of the Microsoft cloud. Will a higher adoption right though, comes an influx on questions and issues to our service desk.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• Teams Phone Calling Plan setup
• Guest User access
• Application issues
• Teams Policy setup and troubleshooting
• Teams channels not creating
• Teams meetings not available for external users
• Teams audio issues
• Teams coexistence issues

MessageOps can assist with multiple Teams services including Customer Immersion Experiences (CIEs), Workshops, Teams Simple Start and Teams Deployments.

7.  SharePoint

Considering how many products SharePoint is the backbone for, it is no surprise to see this on our list each year. In years past we would receive more “how-to” related tickets, but this year it appears many of the problems are with the administration of the product itself. Whether that is making sure internal and external users have access to the resources they require, but also situations where a document library or site may be inaccessible possibly due to an outage.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• Setup external access
• Document versioning
• Office 365 Groups integration
• SharePoint Calendars
• Increase SharePoint storage
• Issues opening documents within SharePoint
• SharePoint permissions
• Map SharePoint library as a drive locally
• SharePoint access issues
• SharePoint site deletion issues
• Inconsistencies between Teams and SharePoint
• Inconsistencies between OneDrive and SharePoint

MessageOps created pre-built templates in SharePoint to help customers with using this product, including a corporate intranet and asset / contract management template.

8.  Office 365 Calendar

The calendar is one of the most important features to any e-mail suite of products. To some, it may be even more integral for their daily work functions than e-mail itself. Usually what plagues this feature most is missing or improperly set permissions at the calendar level. Also sharing a calendar where one individual can see recent updates, but the other can’t, can be a frustrating situation.

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• Calendar permissions
• Delegate access
• Resource calendar setup
• Shared calendar setup
• Free/Busy status
• Teams/Office 365 Group calendar assistance

9.  Microsoft Licensing

Licensing within Office 365 doesn’t sound like it should be a complicated issue. But due to Microsoft making so many adds, removals and changes to their license structure every month, it can become overwhelming to keep up. Many of these requests center around an understanding of what license contains which features. Naming conventions can change without warning or become so similar to other SKUs that you don’t know what the differences are (Office 365 E3 vs Microsoft 365 E3).

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• License features
• Prerequisite licenses (Example: Exchange Archiving requires Exchange Online Plan 2)
• Who to purchase licenses from (Direct, Partner, CSP, EA)
• Assistance purchasing licenses
• Assignment of licenses
• Upgrade licenses to users’ tenant-wide

10.  OneDrive for Business

As more organizations move off traditional storage into cloud-based storage, the rise in OneDrive service tickets go with it. Many of the requests we receive as issues with the local application, virtually none for the web-based portal. Others are inquiries regarding moving data in and out of OneDrive or increasing storage. Below are examples of the requests:

Below are some of the frequent requests we receive:

• OneDrive application sync errors
• OneDrive Document versioning
• OneDrive setup direct-to-cloud (Windows 10)
• Increase storage for users OneDrive
• Restore documents in OneDrive