Microsoft Online Portal provides a friendly and intuitive management interface for Office 365, but at some point, you will have to perform bulk operations. This means connecting to office 365 and using remote PowerShell.

In this step-by-step screencast, we demonstrate some of the most common bulk operations that you will have to perform in PowerShell when managing remotely Office 365:

– Bulk creating user accounts
– Bulk assigning licenses to existing users
– Bulk populating users’ data (ex. department info)

We understand that PowerShell is still considered as a serious challenge by many admins, and we strive to keep the examples in the demo as simple and understandable as possible – assuming that you have little to no experience with PowerShell.

That’s the main reason we start with the most basic example: Connecting to Office 365 using remote PowerShell. This simple task includes installing the required prerequisites (ex. .NET 4.5 and Win. Management Framework 4.0 on Windows 7, MS Azure AD Module for PowerShell – previously known as the MS Online Service module, etc). If you haven’t taken advantage of PowerShell profiles yet, you might find it interesting to see how to create one, and how to automate the whole process of connecting to Office 365 using remote PowerShell.

For your convenience, we have published the text file with the commands, the example CSV file, and the PowerShell scripts that we are using in the Screencast here .

Step 1 We start with installing the prerequisites to connect to Office 365 using remote PowerShell. Then we create a PowerShell profile and include in it the commands to connect to Office 365.

Step 2 Next, we bulk create user accounts in PowerShell. Then, we assign licenses to the users. Finally, we demonstrate how to bulk populate the users’ data.