Book Image

PowerShell for Office 365

By : Martin Machado
Book Image

PowerShell for Office 365

By: Martin Machado

Overview of this book

While most common administrative tasks are available via the Office 365 admin center, many IT professionals are unaware of the real power that is available to them below the surface. This book aims to educate readers on how learning PowerShell for Offi ce 365 can simplify repetitive and complex administrative tasks, and enable greater control than is available on the surface. The book starts by teaching readers how to access Offi ce 365 through PowerShell and then explains the PowerShell fundamentals required for automating Offi ce 365 tasks. You will then walk through common administrative cmdlets to manage accounts, licensing, and other scenarios such as automating the importing of multiple users,assigning licenses in Office 365, distribution groups, passwords, and so on. Using practical examples, you will learn to enhance your current functionality by working with Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online using PowerShell. Finally, the book will help you effectively manage complex and repetitive tasks (such as license and account management) and build productive reports. By the end of the book, you will have automated major repetitive tasks in Office 365 using PowerShell.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 1. PowerShell Fundamentals

PowerShell is a command-line environment that is designed for system administrators. It helps you manage and automate administrative tasks on the Windows operating system. With the trend of DevOps, developers are also getting on board with PowerShell.

Microsoft first introduced PowerShell in 2006. 10 years later, in 2016, Microsoft announced that they have made PowerShell open source and cross-platform with support for Windows, macOS X, CentOS, and Ubuntu. The source code is available on GitHub.

Office 365 is a subscription-based SAS offering from Microsoft. To manage Office 365, we have the following options:

  • Office 365 admin center: We can use this web-based administration center provided by Microsoft to manage users, licenses, support tickets, billing and subscription, and other services such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business that are part of our Office 365 subscription. To sign up for Office 365, we need to use Office 365 admin center. During this signing up process, we select the unique name for our tenant and the global admin account:
  • Office 365 Admin app: This app allows us to manage Office 365 with limited functionality. We can reset user passwords, manage support tickets, and so on. It is not a full management tool. However, it helps you to be connected to your subscription when you are away from your computer:
  • Office 365 management API: The APIs are designed for developers to create custom apps to manage Office 365: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office-365/office-365-managment-apis-overview. ISVs use these APIs to create products to manage Office 365. These APIs are out of the scope of this book.
  • PowerShell for Office 365: This is the management tool that complements Office 365 admin center. We can use Office 365 PowerShell automation to quickly manage Office 365 users and licenses, Skype for Business Online, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Exchange Online, and create reports:

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Why do we need to learn PowerShell for Office 365?
  • PowerShell is a cmdlet-based language with verb-noun syntax
  • How to pass parameters to cmdlets and storing results as a variable
  • How to get help with PowerShell?
  • How PowerShell is an object-oriented language and how to work with objects?
  • Using the if and where statements
  • Using the for and while loops
  • Creating your first script