Office 365 User Provisioning

Provisioning users in Active Directory and Office 365 separately results in unnecessary confusion, repetition, and delays. Besides users provisioning, Office 365 license management - revoking from inactive users, assigning to unlicensed users, etc. is also a key activity for administrators. To perform all these tasks efficiently and effortlessly, Microsoft's native tools and PowerShell scripts offer little help. Hence, managing users, be it in the on-premises AD or the cloud-based Office 365, warrants a systematic and streamlined approach.

Office 365 User Management using ADManager Plus

ManageEngine ADManager Plus is web-based Active Directory management software that also helps in the management of Office 365 accounts. It offers predefined features which allow administrators to perform the desired management and reporting tasks in Office 365, besides Active Directory, Exchange Server, and G Suite, through completely UI-based and script-free actions.

Single-Console Office 365 and AD User Provisioning

ADManager Plus enables you to create new accounts for users, in Active Directory as well as Office 365 (based on Azure Active Directory) simultaneously, from a single web-based console; it uses the same set of credentials to provision new user accounts in AD and Office 365. Instead of struggling with multiple consoles or PowerShell scripts, all you need is few clicks to achieve the same result.

You can also provision Office 365 accounts for the users already present in your Active Directory. Simply specify the desired AD users via CSV import or multiple selection, and their Office 365 accounts are created in a jiffy. As a bonus, you can now provision users in Office 365 alone. Simply select the Office 365 option alone while creating users for standalone Office 365 provisioning.

Further, to facilitate efficient and quick management of Office 365 user accounts and licenses, this tool offers vital information about Office 365 environment, such as licensed/unlicensed users, inactive users, license details, group members, etc. through its predefined reports. ADManager Plus also lets you create shared mailboxes in your Office 365 environment.

By managing the users and licenses effectively, administrators can not only keep their Office 365 environment updated, they can also control/avoid unnecessary expenditure towards licenses.

Flexible AD & Office 365 Management

ADManager Plus gives administrators the flexibility to manage users in a number of ways, to suit their specific needs, such as:

• Single and bulk user management: Depending on the requirement, administrators can provision a single user account or multiple user accounts, at once, in AD and Office 365. Bulk creation, modification, or deletion of users is facilitated by importing the required set of user attributes from a .csv file.
• Template-based user management: Using the customizable templates built into this software, administrators can standardize the user creation and modification process across the organization. With 'drag-n-drop' customization, ability to pre-configure the desired attributes and the ability to make any attribute read-only, hidden or editable, these templates also provide administrators complete control over the user-creation and modification process.
• Help desk-based user management: Administrators can delegate the task of creating and managing user accounts in Office 365 and AD to even the technically naive users, like HRs and help desk technicians, and offload the excessive burden on them. Further, by assigning specific templates to each help desk technician/HR, administrators can still retain complete control over the delegated task.
• Automated user management: ADManager Plus also offers a flexible automation feature which allows administrators to create and manage users at the particular date and time, as needed. This tool also enables automation of both standalone tasks, such as creating, moving, modifying users, etc. and also a series of tasks for critical processes, such as AD cleanup.
• Workflow-based user management: Using the configurable multi-level workflow of this web-based software, administrators can define a customized path for executing AD tasks. It allows administrators to enforce a review-n-approve mechanism for every request, to prevent unauthorized and unwanted changes. Workflow also doubles up as a ticketing tool by creating a request (ticket) for AD tasks.

AD and Office 365 Synchronization Options

Windows Azure Active Directory Sync Tool (DirSync) runs on a Windows Server in your network, and synchronizes the information of users in your local AD with details of their corresponding user accounts in the cloud-based Office 365. Using ADManager Plus, you can specify whether the user accounts created in Office 365 have to be synchronized with the on-premises AD environment (DirSync enabled) or not (DirSync disabled) depending on your organizational policies. If DirSync is already installed, all changes will be synced irrespective of the option you choose.

The ADManager Plus Advantage

Office 365 provisioning via ADManager Plus provides the following key benefits to organizations:

• Manage the cloud-based Office 365 and on-premises Active Directory environments from a single web-based console, in a script-free manner.
• Provision AD and Office 365 users, and assign licenses simultaneously, in a single action.
• Create and modify users using custom-made templates to suit the needs of the organization.
• Bulk manage Office 365 licenses (assign/revoke) for all the desired users, at once, without any restriction on the number of user accounts that can be managed in a single action.
• Fetch vital information such as the details of licensed users, inactive users, distribution lists, group members, etc. via predefined Office 365-specific reports, to aid efficient management of Office 365 users and licenses.
• Create users in AD and Office 365, even in multiple forest environments. The native DirSync tool does not support provisioning users when there are multiple forests in your on-premises Active Directory environment.

With purely UI-based features to manage Active Directory, Office 365, Exchange Server and G Suite from a single web-based console, predefined reports for each environment, and mobile apps - iOS and Android - to manage AD users, ADManager Plus is a comprehensive tool for managing an organization's Windows server environment.

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