- Mastering Office 365 Administration
- Thomas Carpe Nikkia Carter Alara Rogers
- 359字
- 2021-06-25 22:09:21
Adding bulk users
While we covered adding users previously in Chapter 1, The Office 365 Administration Portal chapter, we did not go into detail about adding many users at once.
Office 365 provides a utility that allows you to do this via the website. Many veteran Office 365 admins will eschew this option, because it does not provide the flexibility that can be achieved using PowerShell scripts. We'll cover it briefly here, so that its capabilities and limitations are familiar to you.
Choosing Home | Active users | More | Import multiple users will take you to the following dialog:
Creating bulk users
As you can see, you can download an empty template or one with sample data. We recommend the sample data, since it will give you a fair idea of the expected values to be provided for each column.
The spreadsheet you create or edit should have the following column headings in the first row:
- User Name*
- First Name*
- Last Name*
- Display Name*
- Job Title
- Department
- Office Number
- Office Phone
- Mobile Phone
- Fax
- Address
- City
- State or Province
- ZIP or Postal Code
- Country or Region
Only those columns marked with an asterisk (*) are required. The User Name column should be the UPN (login name), and must end in a valid domain for the Office 365 tenant. Users provisioned in this way are all created with the same choice of Office 365 license, so you can see why savvy administrators prefer PowerShell. You can also choose to disable login for all the new users:
Setting bulk user options
Once users are created, you'll be given the chance to download a file that contains all their temporary auto-generated passwords, which you can also choose to send via email (though this is not considered to be very secure). Note that limited password configuration and notification options are other reasons that push experienced admins to use PowerShell instead:
Creating bulk user results
Now you've seen all there is to creating bulk users using the Office 365 Admin portal. Let's take a look at how this kind of activity can be automated using the much more sophisticated PowerShell commands.