How to Set Up a New Office 365 User and Mailbox

With standard tools it involves a lot of steps to create a synchronized Office 365 user with a mailbox:

  • You need to create the user in Active Directory Users & Computers
  • You need to synchronize the user to Office 365 with Azure AD Connect PowerShell (or wait up to 30 minutes)
  • You need to log in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center or the Azure Portal to assign an Exchange Online license
  • You need to set any custom mailbox properties with a mix of Exchange Online Admin Center and Exchange On-premises Admin Center

With Easy365Manager all of the above steps can be performed within a few seconds using only Active Directory Users & Computers:

To try this yourself, follow the below steps starting immediately when you have created the user account in your Active Directory:

  1. Check that the user account is configured with a country (this is a Microsoft license requirement)
Create Office 365 User and Mailbox using Easy365Manager

2. Go to the Office 365 tab in user properties. As the user does not yet exist in Office 365, you can create it directly from AD Users & Computers:

Create Office 365 User and Mailbox using Easy365Manager

3. Select the type of user you want to create in Office 365 (in this case a normal user):

Create Office 365 User and Mailbox using Easy365Manager

4. Within a second the Office 365 account is created and you can now assign the Exchange Online license to give the user an Office 365 mailbox:

Create Office 365 User and Mailbox using Easy365Manager

5. Select if the user should have an email alias (proxyAddress) for all the domain names you have registered in your Office 365 tenant or only one email address for the domain name matching the UserPrincipalName configured for the AD user account:

Create Office 365 User and Mailbox using Easy365Manager

6. Assigning the Exchange Online license will start the mailbox provisioning in Office 365. This normally takes around a minute. You can see the status in the Mailbox tab of the user account:

Create Office 365 User and Mailbox using Easy365Manager

7. Once the mailbox provisioning in Exchange Online is completed, you will see all mailbox properties loaded in the Mailbox tab. You don’t need to worry about which attributes are managed in AD and which are managed in Office 365. Easy365Manager takes care of it for you:

Create Office 365 User and Mailbox using Easy365Manager

Using Easy365Manager instead of standard tools will save you several minutes of switching between confusing consoles every time you provision a synchronized user with an Office 365 mailbox.

With Easy365Manager, you can get rid of Exchange on-premises, eliminating costs and risk of zero-day exploits targetting Exchange on-premises.