Adding a single User

Adding a user in Office 365 is a straightforward process. Let's walk through the steps starting at Home | Active users | Add a user.

In the Add a user dialog that opens, at a minimum you'll need to enter first/last name, display name, and login name. You may also choose the user's domain, which will be the default for your tenant. As shown here, helpful tips will appear to the right on each field that you click:

Add user dialog

As you can see, contact info is optional as well as the default options for password generation, but you will need to specify a license for the user (or otherwise indicate that you want to create one without a license). Let's take a moment to explore each section further:

• The Contact information section lets you enter basic details about the user, who they work for, and how to reach them. Often, we don't yet know all these details when creating new accounts. That's okay; everything in this section is optional.
• The Password section is a bit more interesting and useful. We can auto-generate a password or specify our own, and we can require the user to set their own password when they next log in or make our choice permanent. We tried to use a very complex passphrase: I wonder what this button does. Yet Office 365 gave us a warning that this password is weak. That's because it is too long for the maximum password length allowed in Office 365, which is 16 characters. Through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess. (Randall Munroe, https://xkcd.com/936/). Unfortunately, in most cases, you don't have a choice; you must create traditional passwords that meet Office 365's complexity requirements. (See more about bypassing this requirement in the Using PowerShell to add users section.)
• Next up, the Roles section is where you specify any administrator privileges. We've talked about administrator roles elsewhere throughout this book, so we won't go into too much detail here.

If you do specify any roles, you'll need to provide an alternate email address, which much belong to a domain that is not configured in this Office 365 tenant. This email address will receive a substantial number of only-sometimes-important notifications about billing, expiring licenses, and so on, and only some of them will also be sent to the user's primary email in Office 365. So, you should choose this with care; you may also want to add forwarding rules to the external address to pass such emails back into the account you usually use. 

Once upon a time, Microsoft partners could also use this section to determine if a global admin was permitted to access customer tenants or only the partner's tenant. However, such options seem to have disappeared.

• Last but not least, we have the Product licenses section, wherein a choice must be provided. If you truly wish to create a user without a license, you can flip the switch for Create user without product license. In most cases, you'll want to assign an Office 365 plan. Doing this will cause the license to expand and show you inpidual subcomponents of the license. (We've collapsed it here to make the screenshot size more reasonable.) This can be important in cases where two licenses carry the same sub-components; in our experience, the UI can sometimes be buggy. You may need to unselect some duplicate subcomponents such as SharePoint Online (Plan 1) to get the licenses to provision successfully.

And that's about all there is to creating a new user, except for the confirmation screen or dealing with any errors that might arise. You'll have an opportunity to send the password (to the user or yourself) in an email, edit this user's details, or jump immediately to creating another user:

Adding user confirmation