You just purchased the subscription for Office 365. Congratulations. After logging in to the admin portal, you might initially find it a bit overwhelming, as there are many features, applications, settings, and more that you will find relevant to your needs. In this quick post, we are going to tackle some very basics of the Office 365 admin portal and what it all means.
Office 365 Admin Portal Interface
Hopefully, by the end of this post, you will find yourself comfortable in navigating the interface and starting out your actual work.
The landing Page
The landing page that you get as the starting point after logging in to your Office 365 Admin account have many different launching icons/tiles. This depends on the kind of subscription you purchased, such as personal or commercial. These tiles are mostly for launching the applications associated with the Office, such as Mail, Calendar, PowerPoint, etc. You can click on the relevant application that you want to open.
At the bottom, there will be, by default, your recent online documents that you can click on to open them directly without first opening any application. But it must be obvious that this will only be visible after you have first interacted with some application and have created some documents. The very first time, the “recent list” will be empty.
At the top, there are more elements for you to consider, such as: Help, My Accounts Page, Notifications, Settings, Search, and ‘Software Installs’ where you can install the software on your machine that you need.
notifications, settings, help, My Accounts page, search option, and
The Admin Center
The last icon in your landing page will be that of admin center. This is where you can go to manage your entire Office 365 subscription and everything related to it. Here, you can also change the display page according to your preferences. This icon to open admin center is only visible to the administrators.
The left of the admin center is your navigation menu that you can expand for going into further options. Initially, all these navigation options are collapsed.
- The ‘Home’ page in admin center gives you quick access to some commonly required tasks, like adding a Office 365 user, billing, your domains associated with the account, option to download more software, and searching for users, groups, settings, or tasks. This home page can be customized to add other tasks that you frequently perform and delete the ones that are not required frequently.
- Within this same ‘admin center,’ on the left navigation menu, you can find another option for ‘Admin centers,’ which refers to the admin centers for other services and applications like OneDrive and Skype for Business and more.
- The navigation menu to the left has all these following destinations that can be further expanded:
- Users
- Groups
- Resources
- Billing
- Support
- Settings
- Setup
- Reports
- Health
- Admin centers.
- Note that some of these options will not be available to the admins who do not have access to them. For example, the “Billing administrator” will only be able to access the “billing” option. Some of the other elements can be viewed but not modified by these administrators.
We hope that you can get the basic understanding of the admin portal through the above article. In the future, we will delve deeper into all the settings and admin tasks available and how you can navigate around them with efficiency.