Starting our series on Office 365 User administration, we are going to start with a blank tenant (Net-New, Greenfield, fresh, from scratch or anything else you can think of that means starting from the beginning).

When you have finished the purchase of your tenant (I'll use tenant from here on out as its the proper way to address your Office 365 instance). you are given a default user. The "Admin" account is this highest level of access on your tenant. You can assign others as "Admin" at different levels in the tenant and we will cover that later.

Now you have the tenant and an Admin user, what's next... adding more users to everyone gets to use the service, right !

To log on to your tenant portal use the following URL. https://portal.office.com. This is your the only URL you need to manage your tenant.

Enter your Admin credentials and password to log on to the portal.

Once your logged on the Portal landing page looks like this. From here you are going to click on the Admin icon.

In the middle of the page there is tile called Active Users. Click the + Add a user

Here are you usual User information properties:

1. First Name. What's the users first (or Given) name.

2. Last Name. What's the users last (or Surname) name.

3. Display Name. How you want their name displayed.

4. Username. Username is special. This has to be unique in your organization. Some places here first initial last name, others have totally unique combinations of number and letters, really your choice. Whatever you choose it has to be unique.

5. Domain. This can get a little confusing if your not used to seeing it or you have a Vanity domain with your tenant. Usually with Office 365 you do have a Vanity domain so you would select that from this picker.

6. Location. Doesn't sound like much but this choice is very important. This will tell Office 365 which region the user will be in. Choosing United States will deploy the users into the US instances of Office 365 in Microsoft's Data Center. Choosing another region could put your users in other regions so be careful where you choose. Naturally choose the Region that is right for your users.

Here is an example (I like using DC Comic names). These are the ONLY mandatory fields, the rest can be blank but then your users wont be very descriptive. While you are adding users, Office 365 is gathering all this information you provide for your users to build its Global Address List (GAL) in Exchange (email, covered in another post).

Moving down the list you can add more optional Contact Information for your users.

1. Job Title

2. Department

3. Office

4. Office Phone

5. Mobile Phone

6. Fax Number

7. Street Address

8. City

9. State or Provence

10. Zip or Postal Code

11. Country or Region

Next section, Password.

You can Auto-generate a password for your users or you can manually create one. If your users have provided a secondary email, like personal email then you can email them the password separately at the end of this Wizard. Many places have default passwords they print and give their users during New Hire Orientations or One on One mentoring with a peer or manager. Either way, choice is yours.

Roles . This depends solely on what type of user or what Role the user will play in your tenant.

1. User. No special permissions on the tenant.

2. Global Administrator. Highest level of access a user can have. This gives the user full access to any setting in the tenant (Including Microsoft Azure, covered later).

3. Customized Administrator. Here is where you can get granular with your user access to the tenant. Depending on which Tier of Office 365 you have subscribed to there are many different roles that can be given to users. For example you want a user to be able to be your Email administrator, then you would assigned the user Exchange Administrator access.

Depending on your Office 365 subscription, you have to assign a license to your users for them use the services you are providing, There are many tiers of service, Contact Us and we will help you decide which is best for you or your business.

Once you have selected the license you want your user to have, just click ADD at the bottom.

Once created, Office 365 will give you a confirmation page. This will have high level user account details and the Automatically Generated password (This account doesn't exist so don't try to log on).

Once your done you can either create another user or click on the user again and change properties for the user as you need. ​​

Thanks for reading. We will do the same thing in the next post but with multiple users. It doesn't have to be tedious work to be the IT person, if your smart, after all you don't use a shoe to put a screw in the wall ;)