📘 Tutorial: How to create your own Microsoft Office 365 tenant ?

What is a Office 365 tenant ?

In the context of Office 365 a tenant is a logical container or organization within the Office 365-ecosystem. It represents a customer or organization subscribed to Office 365 services and contains all the data and configuration settings for that customer's Office 365 environment.

A tenant is usually associated with a specific domain name, and all users and services within the tenant are associated with that domain. For example, if a company signs up for Office 365 and uses the domain "example.com," their tenant will be associated with that domain and all users in the tenant will have an e-mail address in the form"gebruikersnaam@example.com."

Office 365-tenants are important because they provide a way for customers to manage and control their Office 365 environment. They allow customers to configure settings, manage users and groups, and access and use the various Office 365-services, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Teams.

In summary, a Office 365-tenant is a logical container that represents a customer's Office 365 environment and provides a way to manage and control that environment.

How to create your own Office 365 Tenant

To host your own mailbox, experiment with new features you can create your own tenant . In this blog I explain how to get started.

What is a Microsoft Office 365 tenant

A Office 365 tenant , or Microsoft 365 tenant or Azure tenant is the same regardless of the service you are employing.

When you use Microsoft's services as an organization, Microsoft creates a tenant in which only you are granted rights to access. See tenant isolation.

You can add your mail domain to your tenant. This can only be done to one tenant at a time. So if you want to experiment, Better not with your organization domain.

Your tenant has a unique tenant-name, organization.onmicrosoft.com. you can never change this name after creating your tenant.

It's really no big deal that you don't have the prettiest tenant name. This name is often invisible. The easier for your users the better. Because here and there this URL will be copied between environments.

How to create a commercial tenant

Browse To: https://signup.microsoft.com (Office 365 E3 trial)

OR Browse to: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=787538 for an education tenant.

Enter your information and click next.

In this testtenant you add a Office 365 E3 license. Later you can always try all licenses in trial.

After entering your information, you will be taken to the following wizard.

Enter your cell phone number. Enter the SMS response.

As of now, a have a demo environment where you can experiment with a Office 365 E3 license.

Creating an education tenant

You can create an education tenant using the steps below. Education tenants have free A1 licenses by default without specific rules. So you can start working with students right away.

I also recently wrote a complete quick start for an education environment, here.

navigate to: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=787538 for an education tenant.

Enter your information and click next.

After entering your information, you will be taken to the following wizard.

Enter your cell phone number. Enter the SMS response.

Welcome to Office 365 Education.

Add a domain

Licenses for pupils & students + teaching assistants can be put here.

Getting your DNS settings right is the next step. you can do that through this blog.

When to choose a demo or production M365 tenant

Best to create a separate tenant to run tests.

Don't add your domain to the test tenant. Maybe a subdomain.

Should it be necessary to put your tenant into production, it is always possible to link CSP or EA agreements later.

Changing a tenant from educational to commercial or vice versa is not possible.

Activate a demo license in Office 365

1. Purchase trial license -> Browse to your admin portal - https://admin.microsoft.com

2. Choose the desired license

Select desired license
Select free trial

3. Prove that you are not a robot

Enter your cell phone number -> Enter your code in the web portal

Click Begin to start your free trial.

4. Add a license to the user

This can be done through the Office 365 portal for a single user or in Azure for multiple users through Azure AD groups

Requesting a Microsoft 365 or Azure tenant ID

Browse to this website: https://www.whatismytenantid.com

Create a tenant to host your own mailbox

You can add your own user with for example a business premium license of 3-4€/month. This gives you 1TB online OneDrive, SharePoint, 50GB Exchange mailbox and of course you can be the forerunner of a Office 365 migration path.

A tenant with one license costs 4.20 euros per month.

Also read

Office 365 in education - Setting up a class tenant - Starter Guide
Adding a new email domain to Microsoft 365 - Admin Center - Tenant
Create a free Microsoft account | Live ID for consumers