If you are an Office 365 administrator, you may want to enable Priority Accounts for some of your users. Priority Accounts are a feature that allows you to prioritize the delivery and protection of email messages for your most important or sensitive users, such as executives, VIPs, or key decision-makers. In the future, more apps and features will support priority accounts, and to start with, Microsoft has announced two capabilities: priority account protection and Exchange Online priority account monitoring including premium mail flow monitoring.
- Priority account protection – Microsoft Defender for Office 365 supports priority accounts as tags that can be used in filters in alerts, reports, and investigations.
A natural question might include “Aren’t all users a priority? Why not designate all users as priority accounts?” Yes, all users are a priority, but priority account protection offers the following additional benefits:
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- Additional heuristics: Microsoft analysis of mail flow in the Microsoft datacenters indicates that mail flow patterns for company executives are different than the average employee. Priority account protection offers additional heuristics that are specifically tailored to company executives that wouldn’t benefit a regular employee.
- Additional visibility in reporting: In effect, information for all users (or all affected users) is already available in alerts, reports, and investigations. The priority accounts tag as a filter allows you to specifically target your investigations.
- Exchange Online priority account monitoring (note license requirements) – Making sure core functionalities of Exchange Online run smoothly is important for priority account users. Scenarios such as Exchange licensing, Mailbox storage, Message limit, subfolders per folder, folder hierarchy and recoverable items can be monitored.
- Premium Mail Flow Monitoring (note license requirements) – Healthy mail flow can be critical to business success, and delivery delays or failures can have a negative impact on the business. You can choose a threshold for failed or delayed emails, receive alerts when that threshold is exceeded, and view a report of email issues for priority accounts.
The Priority account protection feature that’s described here is available only to organizations that meet the following requirements:
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, including those with Office 365 E3, Office 365 E5, Microsoft 365 E5, or Microsoft 365 E5 Security.
The Exchange Online priority account monitoring and Premium mail flow monitoring features that are described in this topic is available only to organizations that meet both of the following requirements:
- Your organization needs to have a license count of at least 5,000, from either one of, or a combination of the following products: Office 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E3, Office 365 E5, Microsoft 365 E5. For example, your organization can have 3,000 Office 365 E3 licenses and 2,500 Microsoft 365 E5, for a total of 5,500 licenses from the qualifying products.
- Your organization needs to have at least 50 monthly active users for one or more core workloads – Teams, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 apps.
Note: When you apply priority account protection to a mailbox, you should also apply priority account protection to users who have access to the mailbox (for example, the CEO and the CEO’s executive assistant who manages the CEO’s calendar).
In this blog post, we will show you how to enable Priority Accounts in Office 365 step-by-step.
Step 1: Verify you have Priority Account Protection enabled in the Microsoft Defender portal.
- Login to the Microsoft Security Portal and navigate to Settings on the left navigation bar.
- Select Priority account protection under the Email & Collaboration menu.
- Ensure the protection is set to “On”.
Step 2: Identify your Priority Accounts
- Go to the admin center at https://admin.microsoft.com.
- Go to Users > Active users and select the three dots (more actions) at the top of the page. Select Manage priority accounts.
- Select Add accounts, and on the Add Priority accounts page, in the search field, type the name of the person you want to add to the priority accounts list.
- Select the user and choose Save.
You can now search and filter on many portals to focus on these Priority Accounts to quickly target the data for these VIP accounts.
That’s it! You have successfully enabled Priority Accounts in Office 365. We hope this blog post was helpful and informative. Even if you don’t meet all the license requirements to access all the features, you can still identify and filter results to help focus on your VIP accounts.