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

Comments

How to Create and Use a SharePoint App Registration

SharePoint App Registrations are incredibly useful for unattended tasks to read or update SharePoint sites. It's similar to a user service account but more secure. They cannot be used as a user sign-in. They are used in custom applications or automated scripted processes. They are made even more secure with a certificate, in which case, they may only run from the machine that owns the certificate. SharePoint Things to Do with App Registrations Read data and write the data to another process Write CSV, text, or XML files Useful for data for to import into report software Writing the data to other APIs such as ERPs, Project software, or work authorization systems Changing the data Check the data based on a schedule. Update the data based on constraints Change permissions of items in a SharePoint list once an item is past due Work with partners and vendors to provide just-in-time, specific access to necessary data Simple Process Create the application either in SharePoint or in App Re...

The Fix: npm ERR! code SELF_SIGNED_CERT_IN_CHAIN [SOLVED]

npm ERR! code SELF_SIGNED_CERT_IN_CHAIN npm ERR! errno SELF_SIGNED_CERT_IN_CHAIN npm ERR! request to https://registry.npmjs.org/gulp-cli failed, reason: self signed certificate in certificate chain What does it even mean? How does one fix this? There are so much information, it's hard to parse what I'm supposed to do. The Solution: Disable the Company VPN This is not ideal and you should work in cooperation with your IT security operations to let them know what you are doing and why you need it. It was reading this article: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54611707/request-to-https-registry-npmjs-org-co-failed and the comments that finally clued me into our VPN causing the conflict. I previously did not have any issues but our company hired a new CISO who has been very active in hardening our corporate environment. What didn't work: gulp untrust-dev-cert Removing package-lock.json file Reinstall Node.js What I wasn't going to try (and you shouldn't either): npm...

Pronouns Available on Microsoft Outlook and Teams Profile Cards

I'm really pleased with the feature in Microsoft 365 that lets you add pronouns to the profile card! Pronouns are used to replace someone's name in a sentence, such as "she", "he", or "they". Adding pronouns to your profile can help you express your identity and show respect for others. It can also improve communication and trust among your colleagues in a hybrid multicultural workplace. Never set pronouns on behalf of someone else. To turn on pronouns: You need to be able to access the settings in your organizational settings for security and privacy Settings - Microsoft 365 admin center Select Pronouns Settings - Microsoft 365 admin center Check "Turn on and allow pronouns" To add pronouns to your profile: Open your profile card in Teams or Outlook on the web. On your profile card, select + Pronouns or the pronouns listed below your name. To add or change your pronouns, select from the examples (only available in English), or enter your...

mySharePointBlog

Search This Blog