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 (10 chapters)

Connecting to Exchange Online


The PowerShell Exchange API differs from others in its distribution form. To connect to Exchange Online, you will need to create and import a PowerShell session. The necessary modules are made available to you through the session. Exchange is the only case where a download is not needed.

Note

If you need to connect using multi-factor authentication, you will need to download the Exchange Online remote PowerShell module for multi-factor authentication. Remember that at the time of writing this, multi-factor accounts cannot be used for unattended scripts.

The main advantage of this delivery method is that updates to modules are delivered whenever a new session is established. The publisher of the modules (Microsoft or the on-premises administrator) can easily update the modules and the scripting user is guaranteed to be running the latest version when establishing a new session.

We can speculate that a driving factor in choosing this approach is the critical importance...