Improve Your Microsoft Enterprise Admin Skills with a Developer Tenant

One of the best ways to be a more successful Office 365 Administrator, Developer, or IT Ninja is to set up your own Microsoft 365 Developer Tenant. Within your tenant, you can perform many of the same activities that your Global Administrator or other specialized roles can perform at your company but from within your own private sandbox.

Some of the many daily functions that are likely happening at your company in which you can gain real-world experience are:

Using the admin portal
Using the Azure portal
Creating users and assigning licenses
Managing guest access and tenant-to-tenant collaboration
Administering Microsoft applications such as Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, the Power Platform, and more
PowerShell
Graph

One of the common complaints I hear from junior IT staff is the need for access to advanced tools to know how to improve their skills. This is an excellent step to improving skills and understanding common terms amongst IT engineers, architects, and security professionals. And when you are interviewing for an IT job in an IT department specializing in Microsoft tools, mention that you know how to do this and you have one for testing.

Setting up a Developer Tenant

Be prepared with a personal email address for personal validation. (Hint: create a new free email if you want to disassociate this account from your personal email.)
You must have an SMS address to receive a security code. This phone number must be unique to the developer tenant (i.e. you can't have more than one developer account on the same phone number.)
Go to this address: Developer Program | Microsoft 365 Dev Center
Fill in the prompts

For Company Information, do something simple. Use a name generator or a time stamp. This will be part of your domain log information such as <admin_name>@<company_name>.onmicrosoft.com

Once the setup is complete you'll be able to do all the things that Senior IT Professionals can do.

Try out your new account at the following:

admin.microsoft.com
portal.microsoft.com
office.com

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