Set up your new Microsoft 365 Developer subscription | Tips & Tricks

Key Takeaways

hi i'm bob german cloud advocate at microsoft and i'm here to share tips and tricks about how to set up your new microsoft 365 development subscription if you want to develop apps that use the microsoft graph or that run in microsoft teams sharepoint online or office you'll need a microsoft 365 subscription where you can play and work and test your code the best place to get one is usually a free developer subscription available at aka dot ms slash join m365 dev program before i get to the tips let me take just a moment to explain what a microsoft 365 subscription is as you probably already know microsoft 365 is a sas or software as a service offering that includes the traditional office apps like word excel and powerpoint as well as online services like microsoft teams and sharepoint these apps all make use of a common directory service called azure active directory this allows single sign-on and a common security model for all the apps as well as your app if you wish when an organization subscribes to microsoft 365 they get what's called a tenant the tenant includes an instance of azure active directory plus all the data and content that users create such as documents emails chat messages and the like the users are set up right in that same azure active directory when they log in they see the data for that tenant they can also invite guest users who can have limited access to the tenant for collaboration purposes now that you have some background let's dig in to the top 10 tips for setting up your microsoft 365 developer subscription my first tip is even if you already have a microsoft 365 subscription maybe the one you use at work every day it's still worth getting a separate subscription to use as a sandbox you'll be a full administrator in this tenant and you can experiment without having to worry about breaking anything for users microsoft mvp julie turner wrote a great tech community article what is a dev tenant and why would you want one which goes into more detail you can read it at aka dot ms slash m365 dev tenant so for the next tip let's go to office.com which is the landing page for the whole microsoft 365 suite and i'm going to double check and make sure that i'm logged into the developer tenant and not some other tenant so that's the account i got inside the tenant the tip is to remember that you can install office and the desktop apps you can install them for pc or mac the teams client also works on linux and that's all part of the developer tenant so you can download them i like to run them in a virtual machine so that they don't interfere with my daily work and don't forget the mobile apps you want to make sure that you do test your app in mobile so if you want to run m365 in mobile just go to your favorite app store and then log in using that developer tenant login to see the developer tenant and your app inside of there all right so now i'm going to navigate to the microsoft 365 admin center which is also at admin.microsoft.com this is where you can control all the settings for your new tenant notice that users are right here at the top and we have exactly one user so the next tip is to create some more user accounts and later i'll show you how to create some sample accounts automatically the idea here is to create your accounts with different permissions you don't always want to test as an administrator right notice that this user is getting a one of my 25 microsoft 365 e5 developer licenses if you're not sure what that includes well all the apps are actually spelled out down here and you can even disable them for testing purposes if you need to for individual users and now i'm going to make sure that this user is not an admin i'm already an admin so this is for testing non-admin and i can go ahead and add that user in very easy now for the next tip i'm actually going to dig a little bit deeper i'm going to go into show all first of all and i'll go to settings org settings organization profile tab and then into release preferences and this will bring me to something called targeted release so targeted release gets new features before everyone else so if you want to stay ahead of your end users who are in a standard release tenant or if you just want that and all the newest features as soon as they're available then what you want to do is switch yourself over to targeted release just like that while we're here let me show you that there's other admin centers available to you from inside of microsoft 365 admin one of them is azure active directory so my next tip is that you don't need to go to the azure portal by the way i can pin that so it'll cut it'll remember next time i come back and here's azure active directory without having to go into azure itself so tip number six is that this tenant name bg test20 is what i chose you can't change it so choose it wisely if you think later you might want to make this into a production tenant well you can use your own dns name for emails and user logins but your sharepoint url is going to have this name in it pgtest20.sharepoint.com in this case and since you can't change it just think think carefully and make sure that you get it the way you want it here are your app registrations so this is where you'll register new apps that you want say to call the microsoft graph now i'm going to pop back and go over to teams admin to show you another setting this one is just a great convenience and it takes 24 hours to take effect sometimes go into teams apps set up policies i'm going to go into the org wide policy so everybody gets the ability to upload custom apps and just check off the check box and then remember to click save so this is going to allow me to upload applications directly into teams without putting them in the team's app catalog and it's also going to allow me to install apps directly from microsoft teams app studio tip number eight is to use browser profiles to manage all your different microsoft 365 logins if you have already got a microsoft 365 login for work it can get really confusing when you're switching back and forth to your dev tenant so edge chrome and firefox all have the ability to have different user profiles i'm going to switch back to my user profile for work now which brings me back to all the cookies and logins that i had for my work account i'm going to go back to the original portal where i joined the microsoft 365 developer program and go to my dashboard to show you this next tip so again you have to log in now as the account that created the dev tenant not inside the dev tenant and then you can create sample data packs which is pretty awesome so it'll create 16 users for you and it'll also populate email and sharepoint if you so desire for my last tip i'm going to go back to my developer tenant login and i'm going to go to aka dot ms slash power apps community and just show you that you can also get a free powerapps account and if you log in with your developer account then it will be attached to the same tenant so this way you can use powerapps power automate and all the power platform tools with your microsoft 365 tenant so here's a summary of all 10 tips i hope you enjoyed it and please sign up at aka dot ms slash join m365 dev program to get started thanks for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe for more microsoft 365 developer videos