Adding Online Services To Your Windows Server Essentials Install–Office 365

In my last post I introduced the integration of Microsoft Online Services into Essentials and started off by enabling Microsoft Azure Active Directory Integration, and today I’ll run through the process for enabling Office 365 integration. Before I begin though, I will address a question that was raised on yesterday's post regarding the dependencies on DirSync or Azure AD Sync. What is included in these posts are being delivered via Windows Server Essentials without a need for an additional directory synchronisation engine, and it works across all of the Office 365 plans, including previously available Small Business (P), and Midsize plans, as well as the Enterprise plans. It also works with the new Office 365 Business, Business Essentials and Business Premium plans.

Picking up where we left off last time, you can see that within the Essentials Dashboard I have already enabled the Azure AD integration.

The next step is to select the Integrate with Microsoft Office 365 option on the right hand side of the screen.

Because this uses the Azure AD credentials that I have already provided, I don’t need to provide those credentials again, it’s just a matter of clicking Configure.

A short configuration process runs, you don’t need to supply any information.

And that’s it, you have enabled the Office 365 integration and will be able to administer it from within the Dashboard after the Dashboard is restarted.

Now you can see that both Azure AD and Office 365 integration are enabled, but you also have the Office 365 option exposed above the Microsoft Online Services listing.

I won’t go into the administration details in today’s post, instead I just want to present you with the screen above so that you can see what is exposed within this interface, and I will discuss where this comes in handy in another post in this series.