Active users

There's a lot you can do in Active users, and you're going to be doing a lot of it. Interacting with your active users—adding new ones, disabling terminated ones, resetting passwords, and adding and removing licenses—is the bulk of the work that most Office 365 administrators do:

The Active users panel

The top bar for Active users gives you the options to add a user, change which users you're viewing, search users, export your list of users to CSV, and other functions, available under the More drop-down menu.

Again, the options you see here may vary, depending on what products you have (you won't see an option for Directory synchronization if you're not syncing Office 365 to Active Directory, for instance).

The most common activities are adding a user and resetting passwords (particularly if you don't sync to Active Directory), but a dynamic, quickly changing company may also have a lot of setting licenses to do. We'll go over those functions and how to work with the views of your users (a vital skill, if you're a large company with a lot of users) in some detail. Most of the other functions are fairly self-explanatory.

We'll go over much of this information again in Chapter 3, Administering Azure Active Directory, drilling down into PowerShell and some of its more obscure details.