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

In the last post I ran enabled Azure Active Directory, Office 365 and Intune integration, now it’s time to see how this integrates with the local user administration experience.

To start with, let’s take a look at the Microsoft Cloud Services Integration screen to verify that we have enabled the 3 user related options.

 

Moving across to the Users tab, we can see that we only have an administrator added, so it’s time to add a use account from User Tasks on the right hand side.

The Add a User Account wizard launches, and I’ll keep this user as a Standard user, not as an administrator.

We get three options on the next screen regarding our choices with Assign a Microsoft Cloud Services account.

We can choose to assign an existing online account to the freshly created account, and as you can see here I have already set up several users online that don’t have a local account association.

 

You could also choose to not assign a Microsoft Cloud Services account if the user doesn’t need those capabilities.

For this post I’ll stick to the Create a new Microsoft Cloud Services account and assign it to this user account.

We are then presented with the Assign Microsoft Cloud Services licenses selections, where we can either get granular within the suites or leave them as is,

We are then switched back to the on-premises portion of the wizard to select shared folder access.

Next up we can have the option to Enable Anywhere Access for this user account to configure VPN and Remote Web Access choices.

We then briefly see that the online license assignment is taking place.

We are then presented with the summary information for the new user we just added.

Now we have our new user sitting in the Users tab, where we can adjust the user properties.

Instead of changing any user properties, we can verify the Microsoft Cloud licenses that have been assigned.

Here we see that the integration has been successful, and the assigned licenses are showing up as expected.

Other Online Services account tasks we can perform from here include associating online accounts with existing on-premises uers.

Or alternatively we could import user accounts from Microsoft Cloud Services into our local Active Directory domain.

That’s it for this post, in the next post I’ll delve into the Office 365 integration functionality that is exposed through the Essentials Dashboard.