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)

Working with Exchange accounts


Before we delve into scripting, we would like to review the different Exchange concepts we will be working with. All of these entities have the usual commands to create/update/delete them. As mentioned earlier, an exhaustive review of all the commands is impractical, but we will supply what we hope is a good review of the most common maintenance scenarios:

  • User: An Active Directory account that can access Office 365 services but does not have Exchange access. These users cannot be recipients and are usually not accessible via Outlook.
  • Mailbox: A mailbox is the most important entity within Exchange. In addition to emails, it contains scheduling, calendar, and all the Exchange features for a user account. Mailboxes are provisioned not only to users, but for also for shared, room, and other resources.
  • Mail user: A mail user is an Active Directory account that can log in to the different services offered by Office 365. However, the account does not have a mailbox...