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Who is CoreView

CoreView is an Italian company, founded by Ivan Fioravanti and David Mascarella in Milan in 2014, that helps to manage the complexities of Microsoft Office 365. Now it’s a big company with more than 100 team members and that idea has grown to serve over 8 million user mailboxes in more than 100 countries around the globe.

CoreView architecture

The idea behind this solution is simple but very powerful and effective: add a new management plane to Microsoft 365 without change the normal user experience and configuration.

The CoreSuite SaaS Management Platform (SMP) act as a management front-end to all management operators to simplify the management tasks, but also add more control, security, audit, reporting, and automation.

CoreView architecture

Of course, this mean that the management operators must work in a different and new way, using the CoreView interface instead of the Microsoft 365 interface, but this is a big advantage due to the several functions and features provided by the product.

CoreSuite offers one unified dashboard for all your enterprise Office 365 management needs. Users seamlessly shift between tasks like calculating chargebacks and preempting data breaches to onboarding new employees and tracking long-term product adoption.

The important part is the normal users continue at using the same tools and same interfaces as before… and the same credentials and authentication methods!

Note that CoreView can also work in a hybrid environment, with both an on-prem Exchange infrastructure and a SaaS Microsoft 365 tenant, and can really help to simplify the management also in this particular case:

CoreView in hybrid environment

Why CoreView?

CoreSuite is a powerful suite of tools lets you analyze, administrate, automate, optimize, secure, and audit your Microsoft 365 environment.

Basically, we can identify three major pillars: improving IT efficiency, maximize SaaS ROI, mitigate risks.

There can be different use cases, but on the company web site, the best examples are:

  • User administration and management
  • Delegated administration
  • Security and compliance
  • License management

Let’s see each of them.

User administration and management

In Microsoft 365, user management, including employee onboarding and offboarding and support requests, can take up far more time than they’re worth. Automate repetitive tasks with fully customizable workflows so you achieve push-button automation that fits your unique environment.

The main dashboard replaces all the admin centers in Microsoft 365 providing much more visibility, insights and control.

CoreView dashboard

CoreView’s User Card brings together all the information including applications and lets you see everything you need to know about a user, including usage across services, user details, and licenses. Perform the most common tasks, like password management or adding members to groups, right from the User Card.

CoreView User Card

You can of course manage all user settings for each users of on multiple users, or using automation.

Automate repetitive tasks is the key to increase ROI, efficiency, and also improve control and compliance. Using fully customizable workflows you achieve push-button automation that fits your unique environment including approval of this operation.

Also, you can integrate CoreView with ServiceNow and this provides several advantages:

  • Automate admin tasks so you spend less time working and more time doing the things you love
  • Provide self-service options such as requesting a Microsoft 365 license, shared mailbox, or Microsoft Teams group and create these automatically using CoreView workflows from ServiceNow
  • Create tickets in ServiceNow for security events or items of interest within your M365 tenant

Delegated administration

The tradition permission included in Microsoft 365 could be difficult to manage at scale, especially if you need to delegate some management tasks.

The risk is to give more permissions than the minimal set needed to perform the management task.

Failing to implement a strong “Least Privilege Principle” is not only against CISA recommendation, but can lead to compliance problems with ISO, SOC, GDPR, and other industry security standards, where access should be limited as much as possible.

CoreView provides IT teams with the capability to manage delegation effective and in a simple way enhancing the limits of tradition approach and improving the overall security and control.

it is very easy to grant the right access at the right time with granular CoreView’s Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with an easy and intuitive interface.

But more important is the provided control: you can always see (and set) the effective permission for each user in a graphical way.

Permissions management

But permission is just one aspect of delegation… another important aspect is the scope where those permission are appliable.

CoreView’s Virtual Tenants approach allows you to create dynamic segments and assign very specific admin capabilities layer by layer – so you can offload headaches without compromising security or losing control.

Virtual Tenants let you segment the tenant with any criteria available (department, location, group membership, business unit, etc.). 

Users can only see and manage objects within their Virtual Tenant. This lets you give local admins more autonomy, since they can only see what they need to see.

Virtual Tenants are dynamic too. As your environment changes, your Virtual Tenants are always up to date.

Security and compliance

In the last two years, security has becoming more critical than ever with the pandemic situation and the increasing of the remote users.

But for public cloud SaaS solutions, like Microsoft 365, this is even more critical, because usually most users are accessing the services from public networks.

You need to search, filter, and alert on audit data efficiently and quickly to determine what led to a breach and identify affected files and systems.

CoreView retains logs for at least a year, and continually monitors M365, closely scanning all user and admin activities, so IT can view long-term M365 audit log data for deep forensics and root cause analysis.

Also, it’s very crucial to monitor and check compliance with internal policies as well with security frameworks such as CIS Benchmarks or NIST Guidance.

With CoreView, you can schedule reports and even take automated action on results, such as:

  • Which users have MFA enabled – and what the value should be
  • Mailbox forwarding and other risky configurations, such as anonymous access, excessive admin access, etc.
  • Grant or block access to users

License management

Finally, one of the management problems of SaaS solutions like Microsoft 365 is how to proper manage and optimize all the licenses in order to track them, but also to track and minimize all the related costs.

You must understand the complete state of your M365 licenses and their usage.

This is needed to optimize your licenses to ensure that all users are equipped with the right level of functionality and new licenses are brought in when they are needed – at the right size and level.

CoreView provides the way to reach this goal.

Also analyzed more than five million workers from enterprises that are actively using its SaaS Management Platform (SMP); have undergone a complimentary CoreView Microsoft Office 365 Health Check analysis which discovers license optimization and savings opportunities, finds vulnerabilities, and helps IT teams understand what operators and end users are doing with Microsoft 365. The report is available on https://www.coreview.com/whitepaper/microsoft-office-365-license-optimization-report

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.