This week I have started a new project where a customer will Migrate from Exchange 2010 to Office 365.

The cool part about this project is that the Office 365 configuration is “Green Field”.

I have worked a long time in my career and it isn’t very often that you have a chance to do thing correct from the start.

So, I figured that this would be an amazing opportunity to show case a new Blog Post Series.

What we will do over the coming weeks is show you how to:

  1. Setup your Microsoft Office 365 Tenant
  2. Configure the required DNS entries
  3. Get Mail flow working for this new tenant account
  4. Setup our DirSync and ADFS
  5. Get Single Sign-On working

    And much more

Let’s work on Step #1 today. I want to get our blogsite checkyourlogs.net configured with an Office 365 Tenant.

We start by going to: https://products.office.com/en-ca/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans?siteID=SRi0yYDlqd0-roEKXe_lbPaXmHm777nsBQ

For this example, Checkyourlogs.net can really take advantage of the Office 365 Business Premium Features. Also, one of the nice things that I really like about Office 365 is that you can mix and match your licenses on a per user basis.

This seems like a really good starting point.

Enter the initial information required to setup our new Tenant:

Now we need to choose our tenant Domain Name in Office 365. Don’t worry about this as this doesn’t need to match your DNS Name we will fix that up later.

Finish the setup by entering your address and confirming your plan.

Now after this there is a Credit Card screen where you will need to fill in your information.

Once into the Admin Center you can click on Setup Email, Get Started

Now type in the domain name that you already own. In our case, we own Checkyourlogs.net.

Once you type that in click the Next Button

Because I already own the domain and am the registered contact on that domain I have the option to use a Verification email


After Verification is successful you can simply click on the next button. We can add our users in here later.

For some really small organizations it might make sense to migrate using the Office 365 wizards. In our case we will migrate our mail on after we have our DirSync and ADFS configured.

As we manage all of our own DNS choose the option I’ll manage my own DNS Records.

Now, we will need to go and configure our External DNS Records. This is actually quite and easy process and I will show this as well.

The first thing we need to do to configure these required DNS Records is logon to our domain registrar.

I will resume this blog at the point after I have logged in and am in the Checkyourlogs.net domain.

As you can see we have entered all of the information as per the setup request and saved it with our DNS Provider.

The next step is to go back to the Office Admin Initial Setup page and click the Verify button.

Now that everything has been validated we can go to the end of the setup and enter the Office 365 admin page.

Once inside of the Office Admin Center we have one final setting to configure before testing some email out.

We want to change our primary logon from dave at checkyourlogsnet.onmicrosoft.com to dave at checkyourlogs.net

To do this we will edit our user Dave and change his primary domain to checkyourlogs.net from checkyourlogsnet.onmicrosoft.com

Click on Set as Primary

Click Save

If you see this error message – A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name ‘Email Address’.

It means that your account hasn’t been provisioned yet so just be patient.

We can see here if we try to access the email of Dave’s account that it isn’t ready yet.

So, we have learned how to do the base setup of Office 365 in the next post we will take a look at configuring the initial DirSync setup to connect our on premises Active Directory to Office 365.

Thanks,


Dave