Many don’t realise that Office 365 identity is built on top of Azure Active Directory. This means that every Office 365 tenant is using Azure Active Directory. What many also don’t realise is that you can easily access the Azure Active Directory by simply enabling it from your Office 365 Admin console. Here’s how you do this.
Login to Office 365 as a global administrator.
Navigate to the Office 365 Admin, in this case by selecting the Admin icon from the app launcher.
In the lower left of this window, under the Admin section, you should find the Azure AD link as shown above. Select this.
You’ll now be taken to a screen like that shown above, where you sign up to Azure.
You’ll need to enter your details (name, email, country, etc). You’ll also need to specific a mobile phone which a verification code can be sent to.
Once all the details are entered and you have complete the verification via mobile phone select the Sign up button.
You’ll notice here that you don’t need to put in any credit card details like you do when you sign up for a free trial. This is because you are getting the free Azure Active Directory Edition only.
You’ll see your request begin to process.
After a short while you should see a screen like that shown above. You can see that what you have signed up for is Access to Azure Active Directory.
It will take a few minutes to complete the provisioning.
When processing is complete you’ll see the above screen. Select the Start managing my service link to proceed.
You should then see the new Azure Resource management portal as shown above.
If you look in the billing area of this tenant you will see that you have no subscriptions as shown above. You can of course add a paid subscription to this to enable all the other Azure features. This is in fact the recommended way to deploy Azure IaaS services for SMB I would suggest. Office 365 first, and then add a paid Azure subscription to that free Azure tenant you get as part of Office 365. That way all the users and resources are in one location. Even if you plan to do Azure IaaS initially, always get an Office 365 subscription first. All you need is a single Exchange Online Plan 1 Kiosk license for around AU$3 to get the Azure tenant.
The only area that you can configure currently is the Azure Active Directory.
In there you should now see a list of your Office 365 users.
You can administer and work with tenant users from Azure or Office 365 (as well as PowerShell in both environments).
So you have now enabled the free Azure Active Directory Edition that comes as part of every Office 365 subscription. To read more about the different Azure Active Directory Editions see:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn532272.aspx
You’ll also find the Microsoft documentation on this here:
CIAOPS 