Exchange admin center in Exchange Online

  • 4 minutes to read

You use the Exchange admin center to manage email settings for your organization.

Get to the Exchange admin center

You must have Microsoft 365 admin permissions to access the Exchange admin center.

  1. Sign in to Office 365 using your work or school account, and then choose the Admin tile.

  2. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, choose Admin centers > Exchange.

    Get to the Exchange admin center

You can also get to the Exchange admin center directly by using a URL. To do this, go to https://outlook.office365.com/ecp and sign in using your credentials.

Note

Be sure to use a private browsing session (not a regular session) to access the Exchange admin center using the direct URL. This will prevent the credential that you are currently logged on with from being used. To open an InPrivate Browsing session in Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer or a Private Browsing session in Mozilla FireFox, press CTRL+SHIFT+P. To open a private browsing session in Google Chrome (called an incognito window), press CTRL+SHIFT+N.

Exchange admin center features

Here's what the Exchange admin center looks like.

Common User Interface Elements of the EAC

Feature pane

Here are the features you'll find in the left-hand navigation.

Area What you do here
Dashboard An overview of the admin center.
Recipients View and manage your mailboxes, groups, resource mailboxes, contacts, shared mailboxes, and mailbox migrations.
Permissions Manage administrator roles, user roles, and Outlook on the web (formerly known as Outlook Web App) policies.
Compliance management Manage In-Place eDiscovery & Hold, auditing, data loss prevention (DLP), retention policies, retention tags, and journal rules.
Organization Manage organization sharing and apps for Outlook
Protection Manage malware filters, connection filters, content filters, outbound spam, and quarantine for your organization.
Mail flow Manage rules, message tracing, accepted domains, remote domains, and connectors.
Mobile Manage the mobile devices that you allow to connect to your organization. You can manage mobile device access and mobile device mailbox policies.
Public folders Manage public folders and public folder mailboxes.
Unified messaging Manage Unified Messaging (UM) dial plans and UM IP gateways.

Tabs

The tabs are your second level of navigation. Each of the feature areas contains various tabs, each representing a complete feature.

Toolbar

When you click most tabs, you'll see a toolbar. The toolbar has icons that perform a specific action. The following table describes the most common icons and their actions. To display the action associated with an icon, simply hover over the icon.

Icon Name Action
Add Icon Add, New Create a new object. Some of these icons have an associated down arrow you can click to show additional objects you can create.
For example, in Recipients > Groups, clicking the down arrow displays Distribution group, Security group, and Dynamic distribution group as additional options.
Edit icon Edit Edit an object.
Delete icon Delete Delete an object. Some delete icons have a down arrow you can click to show additional options.
Search icon Search Open a search box in which you can type the search phrase for an object you want to find.
Icon: Upgrade distribution group to Office 365 group n/a Upgrade a distribution group to an Office 365 group. This icon can be used only for a distribution group.
Refresh Icon Refresh Refresh the list view.
More Options Icon More options View more actions you can perform for that tab's objects.
For example, in Recipients > Mailboxes clicking this icon shows the following options: Add/Remove columns, Deleted mailboxes, Export data to a CSV file, and Advanced search.
Up Arrow IconDown Arrow Icon Up arrow and down arrow Move an object's priority up or down.
For example, in Mail flow > Rules click the up arrow to raise the priority of a rule. You can also use these arrows to navigate the public folder hierarchy.
Copy Icon Copy Copy an object so you can make changes to it without changing the original object.
For example, in Permissions > Admin roles, select a role from the list view, and then click this icon to create a new role group based on an existing one.
Remove icon Remove Remove an item from a list.
For example, in the Public Folder Permissions dialog box, you can remove users from the list of users allowed to access the public folder by selecting the user and clicking this icon.

List view

When you select a tab, in most cases you'll see a list view. The list view in Exchange admin center is designed to remove limitations that existed in Exchange Control Panel.

In Exchange Online, the viewable limit from within the Exchange admin center list view is approximately 10,000 objects. In addition, paging is included so you can page to the results. In the Recipients list view, you can also configure page size and export the data to a CSV file.

Details pane

When you select an item from the list view, information about that object is displayed in the details pane.

To bulk edit several items: press the CTRL key, select the objects you want to bulk edit, and use the options in the details pane.

Centers, Me tile, and Help

The Centers tile allows you to change from one admin center to another. The Me tile allows you to sign out of the EAC and sign in as a different user. From the Help Help Icon drop-down menu, you can perform the following actions:

  • Help: Click Help Icon to view the online help content.

  • Disable Help bubble: The Help bubble displays contextual help for fields when you create or edit and object. You can turn off the Help bubble help or turn it on if it has been disabled.

Supported browsers

See the following articles:

Are you using Exchange Server? See Exchange admin center in Exchange Server.

Are you using Exchange Online Protection? See Exchange admin center in Exchange Online Protection.