Windows Server Essentials 2016 Technical Preview 3 Microsoft Online Services Integration Part 2

In the last post I gave an overview of some of the Essentials capabilities, now it’s time to start looking a bit more closely at the Microsoft Cloud Services Integration features.

Up first we have the Azure Active Directory Integration, which lays the groundwork for the Office 365 and Intune integration. On the right hand side we click Integrate with Microsoft Azure Active Directory to launch the wizard.

The first thing that Essentials does is download the Microsoft Service Integration Package, making sure that you have the latest package to ensure you can connect to the ever progressing online services offerings. This isn’t a very large download, so it should be pretty quick.

Once it’s downloaded it is installed, again something that doesn’t take very long.

Once the installation of the integration package is complete, we are prompted to restart the dashboard.

Upon relaunching the dashboard, we land at the Get Started screen.

Next up is providing the global administrator credentials for our Azure Active Directory, Office 365 or Intune tenant.

At this stage we need to acknowledge that the password policy in the local Active Directory is set to Strong, which helps ensure better password policies on the connected web services as well.

The configuration doesn’t take very long.

Once the integration process is complete, we are presented with a summary of the subscriptions that we currently have, in this case Office 365 E3 and the Enterprise Mobility Suite.

Now we need to restart the server to allow on-premises synchronisation with Azure Active Directory.

We need to manually restart the server, and for those used to 2012 R2/8.1 you can use the right mouse click on the Windows button to select this option, as well as the other supported methods for restarting.

Going back to the Essentials Dashboard after the server restart we can see details such as the domain names in use in the Azure AD environment, as well as the available licenses. We can also disable the integration here if needed, as well as change the administrator account.

Next up we need to enable the Office 365 integration.

We just click Configure and the Enable Integration screen.

Configuration takes place.

And a minute or so later we have Office 365 integration enabled.

Clicking Close on the Integrate With Office 365 screen takes us to the Office 365 tab inside of the Essentials Dashboard, where we can see some information relating to the Office 365 subscription and the domain names in use, as well as seeing if anyone is at risk of hitting their 50GB mailbox allowance.

We can now go back to the Microsoft Cloud Integration Services page and enable the Intune integration.

The steps are similar to the Office 365 integration, we just need to click Configure.

The configuration process takes place.

And we now have Intune integration enabled successfully.

If you want to set any Intune policies you will need to do that via the Intune portal, which is something that will be covered in a series of Windows 10 posts.

This wraps up this post on enabling the Azure Active Directory, Office 365 and Intune, the next post in the series will cover adding users and assigning online service licenses to them.