Depending on which services you want to manage, there are several software components you need to manage Office 365 using PowerShell. Fortunately, these are free to the public and available for download on Microsoft's website.

To work with Office 365, you'll need to download the Azure AD management shell and potentially also the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant (MOSSIA)—formerly live ID. From time to time, Microsoft makes these available through the Office 365 administration portal, but the specific page you need to go to has changed several times over the past few years. Direct links are provided as follows for your convenience:

• MOSSIA for IT professionals...

You may already be familiar with how Microsoft uses the term tenant. For those who are new to Office 365, understand that a tenant refers to a set of Office 365 services that are isolated to a single customer. In layman's terms, this a is subscription. However, a tenant can have multiple subscriptions associated with it, for the various plans in Office 365 or Windows Azure. In fact, a single customer may choose to have more than one tenant, such as a development tenant and a production tenant.

Assuming you are the global administrator for your tenant, PowerShell will connect you to the correct tenant based on the provided username and password. This is possible because DNS suffixes used in usernames must be unique to a single tenant; they can't be used for more than one tenant at a time.

Let's connect to our tenant. We start...

Connecting to Exchange Online involves creating a remote PowerShell session. This session is created using a special URL that points to your tenant. When you import the session, it downloads all the commands that the remote Exchange server understands.

You do not need to connect to Office 365 using Connect-MsolService before connecting to Exchange Online. Note that if you run the following scripts without setting $Credentials first, it will prompt you for authentication before connecting:

$TenantName = "my365tenant"
$exchUri = "https://ps.outlook.com/PowerShell-LiveID"
if (-not [string]::IsNullOrEmpty($TenantName)) {
  if (-not $TenantName.EndsWith('onmicrosoft.com')) {
    $TenantName = "$TenantName.onmicrosoft.com"
  }
  $exchUri = "$($exchUri)?DelegatedOrg=$($TenantName)"
}
Write-Host -ForegroundColor...

SharePoint is a beast unto itself; it could easily warrant us writing an entire book. In this chapter, we'll stay focused on the ways you can connect to SharePoint Online from PowerShell.

First, let's take a quick look at numerous ways you can interact with SharePoint:

• SharePoint Online Management Shell
• SharePoint REST API
• Client-side object model
• Legacy SharePoint web services and FrontPage Server Extensions
• SharePoint PnP PowerShell modules and others

SharePoint Online Management Shell is the PowerShell module that Microsoft provides which gives you access to high-level administrative functions. If you're accustomed to working in SharePoint...

Like Exchange Online, Skype for Business has its own module that uses remote PowerShell sessions. Similarly, you will be prompted if you don't provide a value for $Credentials. You might also need to specify the UserPrincipalName that corresponds to the credentials you provide—although it's not 100% clear exactly why this is necessary.

Connecting is fairly straightforward, as the example here shows:

Write-Host -ForegroundColor Cyan "Connect to Skype for Business Online"
$global:S4bSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Verbose <# :$VerbosePreference #>
-Credential $Credentials
Import-PSSession $global:S4bSession -Verbose <# :$VerbosePreference | Out-Null #>

With Skype for Business, things get a bit complicated if you're trying to connect to a site through delegated admin access. This involves providing values for...

We'll cover Office 365 Security & Compliance in Chapter 8, Understanding Security and Compliance and connecting to PowerShell will be among the topics described there. For now, it is sufficient to understand that these tools use the remote PowerShell session techniques, so working with them is essentially the same as connecting Exchange Online and Skype for Business. There is one caveat to keep in mind: Security & Compliance requires special roles in Azure AD, so it will not work through delegated administration the way other components do.

There are other services such as Windows Azure Resource Management and Azure Information Protection, each of which has their own special technique to connect and manage. To cover each one here would be impractical. Fortunately, there is a great deal of information online that can help you get started...

If you're an IT professional providing services to Office 365 customers, connecting to Office 365 tenants for your clients can be a bit more complicated than the examples shown previously.

Most commands in the Azure AD PowerShell module will allow you to specify a -TenantId parameter. This is a GUID associated with each of your customer's tenants. But where does this value come from? You can use the Get-MsolPartnerContract to display a list of tenant IDs for the clients you have delegated access to:

Get-MsolPartnerContract -All

Unfortunately, this ID by itself is not very useful. You'll have to combine it somehow with other commands to get something you can identify as a specific client.

For example, the following command will pipe all your customer tenants into a Foreach-Object loop and output the domains associated...