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As we wrap up 2023, we want to acknowledge our partners’ continued support and feedback for Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. Over 11k partners are now using Lighthouse to keep their customers healthy and secure, with nearly half of those partners coming on board in the last 12 months. Over this time, we delivered some of the most requested features, enabling our partners to deliver better services, improve their security standards, and improve engagement with their customers.
Let’s look at some of the highlights from the past year:
- Broadened management capabilities to cover all Microsoft 365 customers. Lighthouse is no longer just for your Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers. One of the benefits of using Lighthouse is that it offers a multi-tenant view, enabling partners to switch between customer tenants they may be managing. Now that Lighthouse supports all commercial and educational customers, you can employ the same standardized process of managing your customers across all your customers.
- AI-Driven Insights to support proactive account management. In July, we introduced Sales Advisor to Lighthouse, a new experience that helps partners anticipate their customers’ needs and discover the best ways to add value with the help of AI-driven customer insights and recommendations. With Sales Advisor we are bridging the gap between account managers and service technicians, giving you a 360° view of your customers’ state and health for holistic customer success.
- Simplified permissions management. We streamlined delegated access permission management to support your transition from DAP to GDAP. With the new GDAP template automation, we made it easier for you to define the level of access you need to your customers’ data and follow your MSP best practices. You can now set up GDAP for any customer tenant without the need to re-run GDAP setup or take extra steps so you can continue to invest your time in keeping them secure.
- Alerts and notifications to keep you informed. We’ve introduced the alerts and notifications capability, and since then, we’ve sent out over 2 million alerts to notify you of activities that can threaten the security of your customers. You can configure customized email alerts for delivery to your users, groups, or third-party ticketing system so that you can react quickly to risky users, active threats, and more. With the ability to configure alerts to your needs, we are making it easier to integrate and prioritize multi-tenant alerts into your everyday Professional Service Automation (PSA) and email workflow.
- Powerful new features to create, deploy, and manage baselines:
- Multi-tenant deployment insights. With multi-tenant view for baselines, you can understand how customers have been set up and continuously monitor the status to gain visibility on the progress tenants have made on the baseline. The single view informs you with insights across all tenants, users, and tasks regarding their deployment exceptions, regressions, and more to help you prioritize deployment activities.
- Detect and remediate drift. Lighthouse continuously scans customer tenants to ensure they remain compliant so you can be alerted when a tenant drifts from your desired state. For example, when your tenant has turned off multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a requirement, you can efficiently and effectively restore the tenant back to a healthy, productive, and secure state.
- Default & Custom Baselines. We improved default baselines to be more stringent and comprehensive than ever before by adding OneDrive sync configuration, enabling device health monitoring, and automation of Intune device enrollment. While default baselines provide best practice guidelines to keep your customers secure and productive, we understand every customer has unique needs. With the addition of custom baselines, you can now create your own baselines to accommodate customers with varying licensing needs, degrees of tenant maturity, and industry requirements, as well as support customers who have subscribed to different managed services offerings you provide.
- Strengthened capabilities to protect customers:
- Secure Score: We heard from partners like you that having have Secure Score visible in Lighthouse is important. You can understand the holistic security status of a customer selected on the Tenants page, such as their baseline, deployment status, and Secure score. With the integration of Secure Score, you can take action to complete a deployment plan that helps your managed tenants achieve a higher Secure Score and then jump to view Secure Score details in the Microsoft 365 Defender portal without having to re-enter credentials or re-select the customer thanks to our integration with 17 admin centers.
- Vulnerability management: We brought more ways to help you proactively identify and build a secure foundation for device insights through Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management. We give a high-level view of the exposure score across your tenants and show you recommendations on how to reduce specific tenant’s exposure to vulnerabilities.
- Device security insights: You can quickly view the overall status, severity, and category of various security alerts in your tenants with summarized insights from Microsoft Defender for Business and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, helping you to assess the big picture before drilling deep down into the full list of alerts.
Starting the year right with Lighthouse
In the past year, we have worked to empower you as our partners with innovative solutions to engage and manage your customers more effectively. As we move forward, we are committed to adding new capabilities that bring you the data and insights you need to help you be more productive while also growing your business.
Here’s a look at what you can expect to see in early 2024:
- Upcoming Renewals: This last year, we surfaced over 1 million customer opportunities in Sales Advisor to help partners engage their customers more meaningfully. We’re taking this further by introducing the new Upcoming Renewals view. This view will help streamline the way you manage your customers’ renewals. Rolling out in late January, you’ll have access to new insights that will help you:
- Quickly and easily track subscriptions approaching expiration within the next 90 days
- Prioritize customer outreach by sorting or filtering on expiration date, seat size, product, and auto-renew status
- Optimize the renewal conversation with contextual recommendations to support your customers’ continued success & growth
Screenshot of Upcoming renewals pageExpansion Opportunities: You will now see new expansion opportunities in Lighthouse, providing insights into growing customers who benefit from adding additional licenses. This is another way Lighthouse makes account management proactive and streamlined, helping you better anticipate your customer’s needs with AI-driven insights and recommendations.
- Role-Based Access Controls: Manage partner tenant permissions through a simplified, role-based access control (RBAC) model. Lighthouse RBAC roles will allow administrators to define and enforce what users can see and change in Lighthouse. Administrators will also be able to manage user access to Sales Advisor directly from Lighthouse, helping to unlock AI-powered recommendations and insights with account managers.
- Expanding default baselines: Building on the success of this year’s launch of default and custom baselines, we’re upping the game by restructuring and doubling the number of tasks in the default baseline, covering the full value of Microsoft 365 and raising the standard for tenant configurations that keeps your customers safe, secure, and productive. This enhancement will help boost your security posture, bringing a more comprehensive defense against potential vulnerabilities.
We are very excited about the future of Lighthouse, and we look forward to working with you in 2024 to make Lighthouse the best tool for managing and securing all your Microsoft 365 customers.
If you haven’t visited Lighthouse in a while, check out all the new features we’ve delivered in 2023. If you’re new to Lighthouse, add it to your partner tenant for free and get started today!
Want to learn more?
- Read other blogs we wrote about Microsoft365 Lighthouse
- Take a look at the full list of updates we made this year at What’s New in Microsoft 365 Lighthouse