Month: July 2017

Get to know Microsoft 365:

e1.pngYep you read it correctly, it’s not Microsoft Office 365 and its Microsoft 365. Well by saying so I didn’t mean that Microsoft Office 365 is going away or it’s getting renamed as Microsoft 365. This is a new service which was introduced by Satya Nadella 2 days back on Microsoft Inspire which brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, delivering a complete, intelligent and secure solution to empower employees. I’m sure most of you would have already read about this today and if not please take a moment in reading this article where I’ve explained in detail about Microsoft 365 and what are the services it delivers and how it can enhance your business.

  1. What is Microsoft 365?

Well as I already mentioned above this is a new service which was introduced by Microsoft two days back which brings together Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security.

  1. Is this something new or was this service already present?

To be very precise, this isn’t something new and in fact this is the successor of the most successful service , “Secure Productive Enterprise” which was introduced by Microsoft on October 2016 .

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  1. What happens to Secure Productive Service now?

Moving further, Secure Productive Service would be replaced by Microsoft 365.

  1. Do we have different flavors in Microsoft 365 as well like Secure Productive Enterprise?

Yes, we have two flavors in Microsoft 365, 1. Microsoft 365 Business which is meant for small organizations and 2. Microsoft 365 Enterprise which is meant for large organizations

  1. What are these two flavors meant for and how can they enhance my business?

Microsoft 365 Enterprise:

  1. Unlocks creativity by enabling people to work naturally with ink, voice and touch, all backed by tools that utilize AI and machine learning.
  2. Provides the broadest and deepest set of apps and services with a universal toolkit for teamwork, giving people flexibility and choice in how they connect, share and communicate.
  3. Simplifies IT by unifying management across users, devices, apps and services.
  4. Helps safeguard customer data, company data and intellectual property with built-in, intelligent security.

Microsoft 365 Business:

  1. Helps companies achieve more together by better connecting employees, customers and suppliers.
  2. Empowers employees to get work done from anywhere, on any device.
  3. Protects company data across devices with always-on security.
  4. Simplifies the set-up and management of employee devices and services with a single IT console.
  5. How about the plans for Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 Enterprise is available in two plans, E3 and E5

  1. When would Microsoft 365 be made available for the public?

Microsoft 365 Enterprise will be available for purchase from August 1st, 2017 onwards. You get to purchase both the plans (E3 & E5)

Microsoft 365 Business will be available in public preview on August 2nd, 2017. It will become generally available on a worldwide basis in the fall of 2017, priced at US $20 per user, per month.

  1. How do I get to know more about the services and features available in both the flavors of Microsoft 365 ?

        Please go through the links below to know more about the features and services available in both the flavors.

For Business: _ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business

For Enterprise: _ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise

Thanks for reading the post. Good luck with Microsoft 365.

 

PowerShell to on-board list of users to Office 365 and assign them Office 365 licenses:

1.jpgOffice 365 is a SaaS platform which is  being used by many organizations these days and it becomes quite hard for IT administrators to on-board their users to Office 365 manually .Of course , this may not be the case when your user identities gets synced to Azure AD from on-premises AD using AAD connect tool .However, if you’re one of the organizations who totally buried all your IT infrastructure implementation and decided to go with a Cloud implementation completely then possibilities are such that you as an IT administrator should take care of on-boarding your users to Azure AD .As we all know , this is indeed quite a time consuming task if we have to do it manually and then assign the appropriate licenses to all the users . So, to surpass all those manual effort, I’ve put together this PowerShell script which will do the magic for you. Alright, let’s get into the details ….

1.Sign-in to your Office 365 admin center using your global admin account and navigate to the “Active users” section as shown in the image below.

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2.At this moment, you might see only the user account which was used to set-up the Office 365 tenant.

Note: In my case, you might see 3 users as I manually created them using the “Add a user “option.

3.Create a CSV file which has the details of all your users by following the guidelines mentioned in this article. The below mentioned screenshot depicts the CSV file which I’ve prepared which has the list of all my users.

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4. Once done, please login to the PowerShell window and type the below mentioned command as shown in the image below. This will tell you the type of license that your tenant is using and how many licenses have been utilized till now.

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Note : In my case you can notice that my tenant is on  Office 365 E5 Enterprise E5 plan +EMS  (Enterprise Mobility ) and it also displays how many licenses have been consumed till now .

5. Prior to running the above command, please ensure that you’re connected to your Office 365 tenant via PowerShell, if not please follow the below article to do that first.

https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn975125.aspx

6. Now, let’s specify the required variables for the PowerShell script.

$UsersToAdd = Import-Csv C:\Users\Vignesh\Documents\Import_User_Sample_en.csv

$LicenseToAdd = “sptech80:ENTERPRISEPREMIUM” à This information can be grabbed from the Get-MsolAccountSKU command which we ran in the above step.

$UsageLocation = “US”

$LicenseOptions = New-MsolLicenseOptions -AccountSkuId $LicenseToAdd

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7.Once you’re done specifying the required variables, please go ahead and run the below mentioned PowerShell command as shown in the image.

$UsersToAdd | ForEach-Object {

New-MsolUser –UserPrincipalName $_.UserPrincipalName -DisplayName $_.DisplayName

Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName $_.UserPrincipalName -UsageLocation $UsageLocation

Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName $_.UserPrincipalName -AddLicenses $LicenseToAdd -LicenseOptions $LicenseOptions

}

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8.You may notice that your users are getting created after running the script as shown in the image above and the licensing tab might display the status as “False”. That’s due to the time taken for the script to reflect the licensing details as it first creates the user and then assigns the license to the user’s account. This is quite normal and hence you don’t need to panic about the “isLicensed” column

9. You can verify the status of the users as well as the licenses assigned to them by running the “Get-MsolUser” command. This time it should display the licensing details correctly.

10. Additionally, you can also navigate to the “Active users” section to verify the same.

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Thanks for reading this post ….Good luck with Office 365 !!!