There’s a lot of buzz about CoreView, the innovative business intelligence platform for Microsoft 365, not only in industry but also among public sector and government organizations. You may have heard that CoreView can help operationalize your Microsoft 365 management and administrative experience, but what does that mean, exactly? In this article, you’ll find out what CoreView provides and why your organization might want it.
The name CoreView refers both to the software platform and the company that produces it. Founded in 2014, CoreView the company is headquartered near Atlanta, GA, and has established a stellar reputation throughout the Microsoft 365 and SaaS community. CoreView is a Microsoft Gold Partner and one of the few vendors on Gartner’s SaaS Management Platform Market Guide. In G2, they have a 4.8 out of 5-star rating.
CoreView the product is a leading Microsoft 365 SaaS Management solution that helps companies by providing visibility, automation, management, and reporting for Microsoft 365 systems. CoreView’s capabilities help a company increase operational efficiency, improve ROI, and mitigate risk. CoreView manages over 10 million user mailboxes, with the public sector and government base being CoreView’s largest installed client base.
The Microsoft 365 environment is very powerful and consists of multiple components—most of which are only indirectly connected to one another. That lack of tight connectivity between the pieces can make it cumbersome to manage.
CoreView enables you to aggregate and collect data from multiple disparate Microsoft 365 data sources and put them into one single view. That enables your IT folks to better manage your organization and enables your managers to make better business decisions.
The CoreView product resides in Azure (including GCC), where it collects the widest, most comprehensive, and unique data set available. Then it presents all this rich analytical information in a single pane of glass—a single source of the truth, if you will. So, with CoreView, your reporting capability becomes dramatically more powerful, more automated, and more comprehensive.
CoreView also combines this rich information with management and administrative capabilities, so admins can not only gain visibility into what’s going on, but they can quickly and easily take action to correct any problems found, so the IT team can be more productive and efficient.
CoreView does a lot for a company’s Microsoft 365 administration, but most of those benefits can be categorized in one of three ways: Improve IT Efficiency, Maximize ROI, and Mitigate Risks.
Let’s have a quick look at each of those key benefits individually.
CoreView gives you one visual dashboard for all your Microsoft 365 reporting capabilities. It not only offers granular visibility into your tenant users, licenses, and workloads, but it gives you the information needed to be able to take action on what you find. For example, if a user account isn’t active for a particular service, with just a few clicks you can see other usage reports for that user, send the user a message, view the user’s manager and team assignments, and more. Without CoreView, you might have to log into several different Microsoft 365 tools to find all that information.
A lot of CoreView’s customers have very large, complex tenants, spread across multiple agencies, business units, or departments. Microsoft 365administrators typically struggle because they have to jump across multiple consoles and portals. CoreView simplifies management by consolidating all the Microsoft admin consoles. CoreView lets you do everything that you could accomplish in those 14+ different admin centers in a single dashboard.
CoreView also makes possible a great deal of automation, for further time savings. Any management actions that you can perform within the CoreView solution can be strung together in what CoreView refers to as a workflow. That can include processes like onboarding and offboarding users, provisioning, changing licenses, changing passwords, and so on. The possibilities for automation are nearly endless.
Since CoreView consolidates all of the workload usage data, it can be a great help in accelerating Microsoft 365 user adoption, which in turn can maximize your ROI for Microsoft 365. Admins can communicate directly with users based on what workloads they are using (or not using) within the set of resources the company has made available to them. They can then target the users who aren’t taking advantage of the resources with training campaigns that will ease them into the tools you want them to use.
CoreView’s ability to access usage data enables you to make data-driven license management decisions, so you aren’t paying for licenses that aren’t being used. It can help you implement a true license lifecycle management process to configure license pools to control distribution. You can also automate and simplify the chargeback and billing model. This is especially helpful in organizations that spread across various agencies and have different SKUs that are billed separately. By gaining visibility into license usage, you might notice that one SKU is being underutilized while the other is straining at its maximum.
One final way CoreView maximizes ROI is by providing the capability to manage teams in the Voice component, such as auto attendants, call queues, and being able to delegate different teams’ voice capabilities.
Most Microsoft 365 tenants have quite a few admin accounts, out of what seems like a necessity. After all, the admin job for a single tenant may be split up among dozens of people. But having a lot of admin accounts is a huge security liability; experts recommend you have no more than 4. This dilemma has bedeviled IT departments everywhere—how do you keep your Microsoft 365 tenant safe and allow everyone to do their jobs?
To solve this problem, CoreView has pioneered an innovative approach called virtual tenants. CoreView can take a single shared tenant and turn it into a virtual multitenant environment, enabling you to delegate specific responsibilities and areas to certain people without making them global administrators. You can slice and dice your tenant by any Azure Active Directory attribute—or a combination of several. That might be by business unit, department, or agency, or field office, for example. You might have the Department of Transportation sharing a tenant with the Department of Corrections in a state, for instance, and virtual tenancy allows their management to be separate without having to spin up separate tenants for them.
The virtual tenancy also enables you to build flexible, granular role-based access control and functional access control permissions and policies. CoreView’s entire permissions system is checkbox-based, which provides a lot more flexibility than trying to pigeonhole users into fixed account classifications. For example, you could assign someone permission to change passwords, run reports, and view dashboards for one specific team, in one specific field office. This capability helps IT departments implement a least-privilege, zero-trust model of management that has been proven over and over again to mitigate risks.
CoreView also enables you to detect any Microsoft 365 security gaps and run audits to quantify risks. CoreView stores and retains activity logs for a year by default, but that can be extended to 5-6 or more years, which many government institutions prefer. That kind of rich historic data enables you to perform deep forensic analysis that can quickly detect gaps within your security as well as run assessments to quantify where there are potential risks and what changes to make. CoreView can also help you implement security standards for the Evolving Microsoft Product Roadmap.
Curious about CoreView and wanting to learn more?
Here’s a video that provides an in-depth look at CoreView and its capabilities. This particular demo is targeted at public sector and government organizations but the features it showcases apply to any business that wants better Microsoft 365 insight and management.
