Microsoft 365 represents a combination of Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility offerings – providing the most complete set of SaaS technologies that Microsoft has to offer. With Microsoft 365, organizations can deploy a complete solution encompassing both devices and applications, along with applying security and compliance policies to protect the entire suite.
This course will help you as you plan your deployment of Microsoft 365, along with configuring and managing your tenant once it’s deployed. It also covers setting up and managing a Microsoft 365 subscription for an enterprise – including managing identities, security, compliance and the supporting technologies in the Microsoft 365 stack.
This course focuses mainly on setting up and managing a Microsoft 365 tenant – including the process for setting up a trial tenant, adding your own domains, and converting your tenant beyond the trial to a fully functional production environment. Now, these steps can seem to be very easy – just click a few options, answer a few questions, and you’re done. In fact, it is that easy! However, if you’re not aware of the big picture and asking some important questions along the way, you can end up painting yourself into a corner and causing problems down the road. At best, you might need to redo some things, at worst, you leave yourself with problems on your hands that might be difficult to sort out later.
After you’re set up, we’ll move on to talking about some of the things you need to consider in your day to day monitoring and management of your Microsoft 365 Tenant and the services that make it up. We’re also going to run through a few demos – showing you some of the practical steps involved, along with some tips and tricks we’ve picked up along the way.
Learning Objectives
- Set up a new Microsoft 365 tenant and subscription
- Add domains to the tenant and configure them for the various service offerings
- Perform the day to day management of your users, including managing user accounts and license assignment
- Know how to monitor the various services in your M365 tenant and have a plan in place to respond to service alerts and manage service requests
Intended Audience
This course is intended for people who:
- Want to become a Microsoft 365 administrator
- Are preparing to take the Microsoft’s MS-100 exam
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course, you should have a general understanding of networking & server administration as well as IT fundamentals such as DNS, Active Directory and PowerShell.
When evaluating Microsoft 365 for your organization, the best way to start is by simply setting up an M365 tenant. So let's go ahead and do that now.
We're gonna start by navigating to the Microsoft 365 product page, and choosing Microsoft 365 For Business. Review the options that are available to you, and then click the Buy Now button. Remember that you can change your license options later, so we're just gonna start with the business feature set. Clicking the Buy Now button starts the sign up process. Go ahead and fill out your company information and click Next. As you're filling this out, know that there are a few unchangeable decisions that you are about to make here. The first one is the country you pick when setting up your tenant. This is important, since your tenant will be provisioned in the country you choose here, or, if there's not a data center in that country, in the data center that hosts the tenant for your geo. You're not able to move tenants between countries or geos, so what you choose here will be the permanent location for your subscription data. On the next screen here, we're gonna create our tenant or subscription ID. This is the second unchangeable decision you need to make. I'll go into more detail on the on Microsoft.com domain later on in this course, but for now, just know that the name you choose here can't be changed later.
It's currently not possible to rename your tenant, so make sure you use a name that you will want to use later on when you move from trial into production. Of course, if you plan to just set up a tenant to kick the tires and try things out, then set this to whatever you want. I've just found that in most cases a pilot moves very quickly into production, and you might as well name your tenant correctly from the very beginning. The only way to change either of these options later is to set up a new tenant and migrate everything into it. This is not a simple or a quick process, so make sure you're making the right choices right now. Once you've got everything lined up the way you want, go ahead and click Create My Account to continue.
The next step is to verify your information, so go ahead and put in your phone number, and choose whether you want to have a text or a phone call. Once you receive your verification code, go ahead and put it into the field here, and then click Next to continue. In the background you can see that your tenant is being created, and it's just about done. There we go. Ready to log back in again, and so go ahead and type in your username, and then click Next, and then type in your password, and click Sign In. Click the Yes to keep me signed in, and we are now in our brand new Microsoft 365 tenant. Feel free to look around and check things out.
In our next demo, we'll start creating users and configuring our tenant settings.
Jeremy Dahl is a Senior Technology Consultant who has spent the last 8 years focusing on Microsoft 365 technologies and has been an Office 365 MVP for the last 6 years. Jeremy is a self-proclaimed cloud addict who architects technology solutions that combine cloud technologies with on-premises solutions, allowing organizations to make the most of their existing infrastructure while still taking full advantage of the agility and scalability of what the cloud has to offer.
Jeremy can be found blogging about Microsoft 365 technologies on his website, masterandcmdr.com, and evangelizing the Microsoft cloud on Twitter.