Creating a User
Your customers and resellers can use the Office 365 User Management capability of the Storefront for creating end-users in their Active Directory.
The indirect resellers can create the end-users of all their customers from a single interface in your Storefront.
Your direct customers can create the Office 365 users of their organization directly from your Storefront.
Our implementation is fully synchronized with Microsoft 365 admin center, meaning that any user created in the Microsoft admin center can be managed from our platform and vice versa.
Please note that the information below applies not only to to legacy 365 subscriptions, but to NCE subscriptions as well.
Creating an Office 365 User
In order for your resellers and your customer to create a new Office 365 user, they need to be logged in to Storefront, and then depending on their capacity (the type of user), you need to navigate to the following path:
Resellers for managing the end-users of their customers:
Navigate to “My Workspace”,
Locate the customer and select “Manage Customer”,
Locate the “Microsoft Cloud Services” section and select “Setup”.
Direct customers for managing the Office 365 users of their organization
Navigate to “My Workspace”,
Locate the “Microsoft Cloud Services” section and select “Setup”.
Inside the sub-page, you can find two distinct sections named Users List and Licenses, where on the first one you can witness the list of the User Directory end-users for the selected customer, and on the second one you can notice the list of all the statistics of the User Directory licenses for the selected customer. However, the focus on this page will be the User’s List section.
The first element of this page is the Users List section. This list contains all the active directory end-users, that have been created under the specific Microsoft tenant.
There are four main columns for this list, namely the "Display Name", the "User Name", the "Status", and the "Assigned". After the last column, you can find the action button for each user.
The User’s List columns are the following:
Display Name: It indicates the full name of each user per row.
User Name: It indicates the user name of each user for the domain prefix it has been defined for the onmicrosoft.com domain.
Status: It indicates each user's status, as either “Active” or “Deleted”. When a user is “Deleted” for more than 30 days, the row will be automatically deleted.
Assigned: It indicates the number of assigned licenses to each user for that service.
“…” (Action Button): This action button can be utilized to manage the licenses of each user, delete a user, and reset the user’s password.
Also, the first three columns of the list, provide you with filtering options and a search functionality. Pagination also exists for the "Users List", displaying a max of twenty users per page.
The second element of this page is the action button named Add User with which you can create a new user by clicking on it. More action buttons will soon follow, in later releases.
Creating New User’s Information
As a result, a pop-up window is displayed after the aforementioned action, which contains a user-creation form. You can proceed by filling in and submitting the required fields, which are:
First Name: Is the user's first name.
Last Name: Is the user's last name.
Display Name (required field): Is the user's full name displayed on the list of users.
Username (required field): Is the user's username for the domain prefix they defined below the onmicrosoft.com domain.
Domain (@): Is prefilled by the system, and it is not editable. Although an MS tenant may belong to various domains, there is always only one default (dominant) domain assigned to the tenant and this is the one that the MS API provides the system with during the user creation.
Locations (required field): This field is a drop-down menu with a list of locations around the world and is used to determine the new user's location. By default, the location is pre-determined based on the tenant's location that manages that specific domain.
* All the fields with the exception of the "First Name", "Last Name" are required.
Creating New User’s Password
In the next section of the pop-up window, you need to create a password for the Office 365 user.
You have two options to create a new password, as well as some other related options.
Auto Generate Password (radio button): The system automatically generates a random password. The “Auto Generate Password” option is selected by default.
Let Me Create Password (radio button): The user must create the password manually. When this option is chosen, the user must enter the same password on both the “Password“ and the “Confirm Password“ fields. In case the password is not the same on both fields, the following message appears: “Passwords must match!“ If the password does not fulfill the following requirements, a message appears underneath it in red color. “Your password must be at least 8 characters long and it must contain at least 1 number, 1 non-alphanumeric symbol and 1 uppercase letter.”
Send Password In Email Upon Completion (email-textbox): This required email-text field is utilized for dispatching a Welcome Notification Email along with the new user’s credentials to whichever email the Storefront user has filled in. For more information concerning the Notification email and its setup, please continue reading the following section of this page.
Force User Change Password Upon First Sign-in (checkbox): Regardless of the way you have chosen to create the new user’s password, you have the option to force change the user’s password upon the first sign-in into the Partner Center/ Admin Center. By default, the checkbox is not active.
Welcome Notification Email with New User’s Credentials
You can edit the systemic notification about the creation of a new user's credentials under the following path in BSS. BSS Setup > Notifications > Accounts > Welcome Office 365 customer user. You are not able to merge any fields on this notification. You can still add the Last Name and First Name of the new Office 365 user if you so wish, simply by adding [#FirstName#], [#LastName#] manually in the notification body.
After completing this phase of the new user creation, the Storefront user receives a notification containing his credentials, as described above.
Upon clicking on the Next button and finishing the first step of the user-creation-form process, the new user is created in the customer’s Active Directory.
Assigning Roles to a New User
On the second step of the user-creation-form process, you can assign one or more roles to the newly created user. Each role maps to common business functions and provides permissions to people in your organization to do specific tasks.
The available roles to be assigned are the following:
Office 365 User Role (selected by default)
Office 365 Global Administrator Role
Office 365 Customized Administrator Role
Office 365 User Account Administrator Role
Office 365 Helpdesk Administrator Role
Office 365 Service Support Administrator Role
As it is evident, you can select more than one role from the “Office 365 Customized Administrator Role”. This is also the case for the Partner Center.
Assigning Licenses to a New User
On the third step of the user-creation-form process, you can choose to assign one or more licenses to the newly created user or none at all. The available licenses to be assigned are licenses that have been purchased for this customer but haven’t been used yet.
Each depicted license has a toggle next to it and is by default set to the "Off" position when creating a new user. Under each available subscription, the number of available licenses is being displayed.
Upon turning the toggle to the "On" position, the number of available licenses for the specific subscription is reduced by one(1), and the respective license is set to be assigned to the new user.
On the following page, Managing & Monitoring Users & Licenses, we focus on managing and monitoring the users and the licenses of the user’s directory.