Set up Office 365 for professionals and small businesses
As the administrator for your organization, you’ve signed up for Office 365. You signed in to your Office 365 account, explored the Admin Overview page, and watched the video tour for administrators.
Now what?
As the admin, there are a few important setup tasks you need to do before the people in your organization can use Office 365. This guide leads you through those steps.
Let’s get started.
Set up Office 365 for your organization
Step 1: Choose your domain and set up user accounts
Step 2: Set up email
Step 3: Set up your team site and documents
Step 4: Set up mobile access
Step 5: Set up online communication tools
Step 6: Set up a public website if you don’t already have one
Step 7: Get everybody ready
Step 1: Choose your domain and set up user accounts
Do you want your email addresses to use the name of your organization, like “@fourthcoffee.com” or “@contoso.com”? Most organizations do. You can do this in Office 365 if you already own a domain. (A domain is the “contoso.com” part of an email address or URL.)
If you don’t already own a domain, you can use the domain that you get with Office 365, which looks something like “contoso.onmicrosoft.com”. But either way, before you do anything else, we recommend that you decide which domain to use and then create user accounts (if there’s anyone besides you in your organization).
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In the first 30 days that you use Office 365, at the top of the Admin Overview page, you’ll see links to Add a domain and Add users. They go to the Domains Quickstart, a step-by-step guide that leads you through the key setup tasks that everyone should do first:
The Domains Quickstart isn’t available to everyone right now. (See the Note about the Availability of the Domains Quickstart.) But all admins can see domain and user account information by going to the Admin Overview page in Office 365 and, in the left pane, clicking Domains or Users. |
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Step 2: Set up email
Office 365 comes with Exchange Online (which provides your email, calendar, contacts, and more) and Outlook Web App (which you can use to read all that information). When you created user accounts in the Step 1, Office 365 automatically created mailboxes for each user. But you control the settings for everyone’s email accounts, including mobile access. You need to decide the best way for your organization to import mail to Office 365.
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Step 3: Set up your team site and documents
SharePoint Online includes team sites. They provide a central place to access your organization’s documents and business information from almost anywhere. One team site is automatically created for your organization when you sign up for Office 365. You’ll need to add documents to the team site and give people permission to access it. You can also customize team sites with shared lists, calendars, pages, and more.
You get Office Online (which includes Excel Online, OneNote Online, PowerPoint Online, and Word Online) with your team site. You can also save and access other documents to a team site, including documents made with the Office desktop applications.
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Step 4: Set up mobile access
Because Office 365 stores your data in the cloud, you can access that data from cell phones and other mobile devices.
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After your email is on Exchange Online (which comes with Office 365), you can read it on a mobile device. You can also receive notifications from the Lync for mobile clients app. As the admin for your organization, you can turn those settings on or off for everybody else:
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Step 5: Set up online communication tools
With Lync, you can see if your coworkers are online and communicate with them through instant messaging (IM), audio calls, or video calls. You can even conduct online presentations that include audio, video, screen-sharing, and a virtual whiteboard.
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Step 6: Set up a public website if you don’t already have one
In addition to managing your team site, you can use SharePoint Online to easily design and customize a professional-looking public website for your organization. (If you already have a website, you can have Office 365 point to it by following Step 1: Choose your domain and set up user accounts. However, you can’t import your current website into Office 365.)
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Step 7: Get everybody ready
After you’ve set up Office 365, you have another task—preparing and training the people in your organization.
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As the admin at your organization, you’re probably the person everyone goes to for help. That will probably also be true for Office 365. If you get asked a question that you don’t know the answer to, there are resources specifically for admins like you. More resources:
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Availability of the Domains Quickstart
This feature is available to organizations who signed up for Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses after the December 2011 update of Office 365, and who use Office 365 in English and chose the United States as their country or region during the sign-up process.