Pass Microsoft Teams MS-700 Exam in First Attempt Easily

Introduction

1. Understanding the Microsoft Environment

Okay guys, so welcome. Welcome here. We're about to jump in, and we're going to be really hitting teams hardcore and all that. But before we do, I wanted to make sure that you guys understood the foundation of the micro-soft environment. What I usually find is that a lot of times people will jump into a course without having some of the prerequisite knowledge of just how things work, how things have worked in the past, how they work now, and sort of where things are going in the Microsoft world. So what I want to do in these next three lessons, these three videos, is just sort of outline and draw out the way things have been in the past with the Microsoft world, where they kind of are now, and where they're going. And make sure you guys have some of the prerequisites.

We're going to be focusing on teams. These three lessons aren't really specific to teams, but they're sort of prerequisites to having some of the foundational knowledge. Now, if you've taken my courses before, maybe you've seen something like this; you can totally skip this. Or, if you feel like you've already got a really good understanding of the way Microsoft environments have worked in the past and kind of where Microsoft is going with their cloud services and all that, then you can totally skip these. I'm not saying you have to watch these next three lessons, but if you haven't seen them or you don't feel like you've got the best foundation, then these next three videos, where I draw this stuff out for you, are really going to help you. So I'd like to encourage you to watch it. But if you feel like you've already got this knowledge, then you can go ahead and move on and skip these next three videos and continue with the course. You're.

2. Foundational understanding of Microsoft Traditional Active Directory Domains

And Microsoft's services and products, particularly their cutting-edge offerings. It's important for you to have a good foundation of how things were, how things are now, and kind of what Microsoft's vision is for the future. So I want to make sure you have a good solid foundation of things like active directory domains, remote access, virtualization, and then getting into the cloud stuff and how it all came together. Okay? So we'll start with this. You go back far enough; you go back to the 1950s and the 1960s. They had mainframes, these massive computers that would take up the size of a room, and then eventually that became sort of the size of a refrigerator.

And then, as we got along, people started making their own computers, and we got to the late 1970s, when the concept of personal computing came out. And then, by the time we got there, we actually started seeing computers in businesses. And so your companies out there would have actual computers that your office staff could use. And I'm just going to kind of draw a couple of things out for you here. The idea here with these computers is that they would start populating the office, and maybe you'd say you've got 1000 computers in your business. And of course, in the early days of computers, as we got into the 1980s when PCs and stuff started really becoming popular, we lived in what was called a peer-to-peer network. Okay? A peer-to-peer network basically means that every computer is equal. There is no real authority over each individual computer. In other words, if your boss walks up to you and says, "Hey, IT person," I want you to configure five things on all 1000 computers. You had to either sit down at all 1000 computers and configure them one at a time or write a script to do it. So peer-to-peer networking is not a great way to try to achieve things centrally, right? So what happened was that a company called Novell created a product called Netwear.

They really changed things. They really push this whole concept of what is called client servers, where you have a more powerful computer, maybe not the size of a mainframe, but a more powerful computer, and your client computers interact with that server. Right? Well then, of course, Microsoft eventually got into the networking world as well. They created this thing called the domain, which is very similar to what Novell was doing. And then you reach the year 2000, where things really sort of change. Microsoft comes out with a new type of domain. They start by using a triangle as their symbol of a domain. All right? And one of the main concepts of a domain is that you have a special type of server, okay? and the server is called a domain controller. We'll just put "DC," all right? And inside that domain controller, you have a database. I'm just going to draw this little cylinder-looking thing for you guys here, all right? And this is your database. Now, your database is called the Active Directory database, all right?

And so your domain controller controls your domain. So if you really want to know, like, why are domains important? All right? My answer to you is one word, and that is centralization. A lot of people think security Yes, security is important, definitely. But centralization is why domains are so important, okay? Because they allow us to control all of our stuff, our clients, our servers—all of that stuff centrally, right? We can manage it all in one place instead of having to sit down at each individual machine and make changes, right? That's the idea. Okay. Of course, you'll usually want to have more than one domain controller. And the reason why you don't want to have more than one domain controller is the same reason you want to have more than one of anything—really, more than one of any server, especially—and that is fault tolerance and load balancing. Fault tolerance means redundancy. If one fails, you've got another. Okay? and load balancing. You don't want all of your machines having to interact with only one server. I always use the analogy. It's like going to the grocery store and getting a cartload of groceries and going to check out. And then you get to the checkout line, and it turns out there's only one cash register and one cashier open. There are like 15 people waiting in line to check out, right?

Well, first off, if that cash register breaks down, that's the only one they've got. Well, nobody's going to get the check, right? Secondly, you've got a performance problem, right? It's going to take forever to get out of that store. So what you want to see is a bunch of cash registers open when you go to check out at a grocery store. And you can sort of load balance that way, right? Some people can go to one line, some people can go to another, and so on and so forth. So we can do that if we've got multiple servers. Okay? So these domain controllers also have these things called GPOs, group policy objects, which help us control everything. So instead of having to sit down one-by-one and make changes to a machine, I can create this thing called the GPO. The GPO can deploy the settings out to the machines. Okay? Now, something else that's interesting about Active Directory, with Active Directory being the directory services database and all that you use, is that it uses a protocol called LDAP, the lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which is basically the language that your directory services speak. User accounts, groups, all that stuff Passwords are all kept in there. And it also uses a protocol called Kerberos for its security.

Now, domain controllers replicate. So whatever you do to one Active Directory database, it actually does it to the other. For example, if I create a little user account, we'll say that this little smiley face guy that I'm making here is going to represent a user account. All right? If we create this user account, we are creating the user account on the first domain controller here, which will replicate to the other domain controller and any other domain controllers in the Active Directory domain. So, basically, I'm saying that these domain controllers replicate with one another. So when you change one database, it's going to replicate over to the other, so they stay in sync. Okay? Now, another important component of a Microsoft domain is that your domain must have a name. And the name that it uses is a DNS name-domain name system, also known as domain name space. Domain name service is another name for it. Okay? And this is because we human beings don't really like to identify devices by numbers. We don't really like having to memories lots of numbers, right? We prefer to use names when we identify things. So DNS is the service that does that, okay? All your computers and services—all of that—have IP addresses that they use, which are numbers.

But we like to associate things with words and names. So your domain will have a name. Like, for example, if my domain is called Examlabpractice.com, that's my company name. A lot of times, your domain name will be the same as your web presence. Okay? So the other problem with that, though, is if you're going to have a DNS name, you've got to have a DNS service that's going to manage all that. So we actually have to have a server called the DNS server. Now, granted, your domain controller can actually play this role, but I'm going to draw it separately here and inside that DNS database. Inside that DNS server, we have what is called a DNS database. So I'm going to draw another one of these little cylinder-looking things here. And the other thing that's interesting about that is that the database will be named after your domain.

So if your domain's name is Examlabpractice.com, your database is going to be called Examlabpractice.com. That database is called a zone database, also known as a name database or namespace database. And what will happen is that all of your computers, as they come online, will automatically register their names inside that database, along with their names and their IP addresses. So now when the computers want to find each other, they can actually query that DNS server to find each other. So when these computers boot up, they have to authenticate to one of these domain controllers using Kerberos. They're going to do LDAP-based queries to do that, but they're going to first actually query DNS and say, "Hey, DNS, do you know who my domain controller is?" And since those domain controllers have actually registered DNS, he'll reply back and then DNS, and then the client can go and get authenticated. Okay, and you are officially authenticated. And then when a client wants to communicate with the file server, they'll actually query that for the file server through DNS as well.

Okay, so that is your basic back and forth that is happening to make all of this work. Now, we also have an Internet connection to think about. So let's draw this little cloud symbol here, and we'll just kind of clean it up here. There we go. So our little cloud here is going to represent the Internet coming in. All right, let me just label that as "internet." Of course, you don't want your internal network to be completely unprotected, so you probably want to have a firewall, right? Firewall router type combination So we'll say FW for firewall. We'll put a little box around it. That's going to be our firewall, and that's going to help police traffic going out to the Internet and things coming in from the Internet. All right. And we'll talk more about things coming up here in a minute, in the next foundation video. But hopefully this has given you a good understanding of what the domain is and why it is important. It's for centralization purposes. You can deploy GPO group policy objects, which throw restrictions out there on people's computers, machines, and all that. And hopefully, you now have a good understanding of what an Active Directory domain is.

3. Foundational understanding of Remote Access, DMZ, and Virtualization Concepts

To talk to you about the remote access side of things. I want to talk a little bit about what the DMZ is and all that stuff as well. So as we move on here, I mentioned Active Directory. It came out in the year 2000 thousand. Originally, it was an operating system called Nt Five. And then Windows 2000 is when theyreleased it with they changed the name. They changed the name from NT 5 to Windows 2000. And the directory service used to be called NTDs, and they renamed it to Active Directory. Okay? So 20 years ago, Active Directory came out. This was cutting-edge. It was great. It was awesome. And one of the things that we sometimes need to happen is that we need computers on the outside world to get to the inside world, right? So imagine you've got a computer here. Maybe you've got somebody working from home, and they need to be able to access a resource. Like, maybe they need to access that file server. Well, let me tell you what you don't want to do. You don't want to simply open up a bunch of ports on your firewall and let things in, such as fileservers and Windows, which use a protocol called SMB Server MessageBlock, which uses ports four, four, or five. And there are a few other ports here too, but you would be opening ports coming in to let things come in from the Internet. And that's very dangerous, right? We don't want to do that on our firewall. We don't want to open up file ports and all that because we're just asking for a bad guy, all right? We're asking for a hacker to attempt to get into our environment, right?

So let me just create a hacker here, all right? Let's just zoom in on him. We're going to make him a bad guy here. Let's give him some devil horns. Let's give him a devil tail, all right? We'll make him look like he's just in a bad mood. All right? We'll mall right. Sometimes I get a little carried away. Sorry. All right, so there's my hacker, all right? And we don't want to open up a bunch of porches because we don't want a hacker to be able to get in, right? That's essentially where we're going with this. Now we do have somebody over here, though, that we do want to get in. So maybe we're going to let them do that. There are a couple of ways you can do that. One would be to get something called a VPN concentrator or VPN router. It's essentially an appliance, a box that you install on your network to allow secure access.

Now, the Microsoft way of doing things usually involves setting up a server called a RazServer, sometimes referred to as an Rs Server, okay? And that Raz server is a remote-access server. And based on what we can do, we can allow access with our firewall. We can allow what's known as a VPN, a virtual private network. So from there, you can securely connect from this outside world to that Raz server, and you can access this file server or some other resources, and it's all going to be encrypted using what's called an encrypted tunnel, okay? And that will be one of your primary and safest methods of allowing things to enter. Another thing, Microsoft Sports is a thingcalled direct access, which are not reallyfocusing a lot on that these days. But VPN is going to be one of the main ways that you do this, okay? There are other solutions. You can enable remote desktop by configuring a device known as a Remote Desktop Gateway. But VPN is going to be your main way to do things, okay? Now the other thing I'd like to mention is, what about situations where we have something like a server that we need to make available to the outside world?

Okay, let me give you an example. Let's say that you are hosting your own Web server, all right? You have a web server, and you are hosting it. You're not going to pay GoDaddy or somebody like that to do it. You're going to host your own Web server. Well, here's the question. Where are you going to host it? Are you going to host it here? Are you going to host it out here? Well, I'm going to tell you, if you host it here, that's dangerous. Because if you're letting people get to your web server anonymously, then you've got people coming in here and going through your firewall and accessing that web server. Well, hackers can do this thing called pivoting. If they gain control over that server, they might be able to pivot to other resources. So that would not be a good idea. A better solution would be to store the Web server out here.

Okay? The problem, though, with storing it outside your firewall is that you are not really giving your web server any protection. It's exposed completely to the elements. At that point, it's outside the firewall. So generally, the rule of thumb is that what most people would do with this is actually get another firewall, okay? And they put the other firewall—actually, next to their Internet—on. And at that point, you have something called a DMZ, a demilitarised zone, also known as a perimeter network. So a couple of names for that DMZ perimeter network And the great thing about that is that I can now police the traffic flowing in through the firewall. I can police what ports I might allow, such as port 84 40, and if you have a DNS, you do port 53. But now people can get to this web server coming in. But then you could block everything except maybe your VPN and all that stuff going through that firewall. So that is the idea of a DMZ. So if a hacker was to gain control overthat website server, they would still be blocked andwould not be able to flow through that firewall. That's the logic of this.

All right? So the concept here is that there are multiple solutions when it comes to trying to allow people out or allow people in. If you're wanting to host something like a Web server, maybe you want to do the same thing with an email server. Microsoft has Exchange, and you have a type of Exchange role called Edge, which, of course, we could have what's called an Exchange Edge server in there. And really, the mentality there is the logic that has always been with the world: we've always felt the need to host everything ourselves and manage everything ourselves. And I want to kind of go over a couple of things in that regard. Let me just kind of move some of this out of the way to make some room here. All right? So first off, I talked about centralization in a domain and the fact that we have to have central control. GPOs are going to be one of our main ways to do that. Microsoft also has another server that helps you get even more control over your environment. And in the 90s, they called it SMS system management services. And then in the early 2000s, they renamed this server that I'm about to tell you about to SCCM, which is System Center Configuration Manager, okay?

And so for the longest time, that's what it was called. And system centre configuration manager can give you even more control over your devices. It can inventory devices; you can deploy images; you can deploy applications; you can configure compliance. I mean, there's a tonne of stuff you can do with SCCM, all right? and more recently, that got renamed to another product. It is no longer called SCCM. Hopefully, this is not a shocker to you. It is now called Endpoint Config Manager. I'm just going to install CMendpoint configuration manager. And this is because of a product that they're deploying in the cloud called Intune that has sort of become the big cloud-based system for managing things. And what they want is for Config Manager and this other product, Intune, to sort of centrally work together. And so they renamed ConfigManager to Endpoint Configuration Manager. And so that's what it's now referred to as. All nager and tFinally, another type of logic that we've had over the years when it comes to managing things as people is that we have to have all these different servers, right? So we have to have an Exchange server, all right? We had to have a SharePoint server. I'll just say it, Spt: we need a database server like SQL. And we've already got a file server, right? Let me use that little file server here. Actually, just for the sake of keeping the font sizes the same, we'll just make it a little bit smaller so it'll fit here. So now we have a file server. Now the mentality has always been that we have to host all these servers ourselves, okay? And we have to have all this equipment in order to do it. And so you end up with a lot of servers in order to deal with everything. In the early 2000s, a company called VMware really came to the table with some innovative solutions for dealing with the problem of having so many servers and so much hardware.

I actually used an old solution to fix newer problems. There's a thing called hypervisors. This is a term that actually came out in the 1970s, back in the Unix days, the early Unix days, and it was a virtualization idea. Hypervisor is not a new thing. It's actually been around for a long time. Okay? So they actually really came up with some cutting-edge stuff on this. And the concept was that if you can emulate hardware (processors RAM, storage, and network), you can then put software on that emulated hardware. So a virtual machine is emulated hardware with software installed such as servers, Windows 10, Windows Server, and so on. So you could take these four servers, these four physical servers, and you could actually run them on a single physical server. Okay? So instead of having so many different pieces of hardware here that you're trying to deal with and manage, you could do it all on a physical server. Of course, a lot of people, when they see that, are like, "Now you've got a single point of failure." Well, I'll get to that in a second. So VMware really took off. Microsoft definitely took note of what they did. Microsoft actually bought a product called Virtual PC and then turned it into Virtual Server, and then eventually they renamed it to HyperV. So that is actually the Microsoft virtualization solution, even though VMware is still probably considered more popular than HyperV. So the other thing that we've got here is the fact that we have a single point of failure. As I mentioned, if that server dies, we're in crosoft virtuaThat's the beauty of virtualization. We have the ability to actually very easily get another server. All right, let me shrink this down a little bit. We can get another server, we can use a storage area network, we can host our virtual machines on that, and the HyperV servers can do clustering.

So you can get a very high level of redundancy with the help of virtualization. Okay? And so that's the idea of virtualization. Now with virtualization comes another term, and it's the term "elasticity." Elasticity means that those servers can have tonnes of memory, tonnes of storage, tonnes of network bandwidth, and tonnes of CPU usage, and they can pull it. So if the Exchange virtual machine needs more memory and the sequel virtual machine doesn't, then SQL can give up the memory it's not using, and the Exchange virtual machine can use that memory and CPU usage, and it can shrink and grow. Okay? And that's one of the greatest benefits of virtual machines. Another great benefit of virtual machines is the fact that you have these things called checkpoints, which used to be called snapshots, okay? But they're now called checkpoints, at least in HyperV terms. They are. So this really changed things. And as you'll see, this is also sort of the forerunner of cloud computing. All ings calledBut hopefully that gives you guys now a decentfoundation of some of the other concepts remote access,EMZ, as well as the basics idea of virtualization.

4. Foundational understanding of Microsoft Cloud Services

It's now time to talk about how cloud computing came about. Alright? So with virtualization and this concept of elasticity, it definitely got people thinking, and that was, you know, that we could actually, as a company, host hardware and make that hardware available to people to host resources like virtual machines on our hardware.

Now, this isn't a new idea. Let me give you an example, okay? Between my wife and myself, I have three teenage daughters, and I have no stress in my life whatsoever, right? But two of them are driving. They have cars. So I have four cars that we have to deal with, okay? Now I like to use this analogy of this.Now, if one of those cars breaks down, I have a couple of options. One is that I could fix the car myself, so I could actually turn my garage into an auto mechanic shop. I could buy all the tools, get all the skills, learn how to work on cars, and do it myself with a hydraulic lift and really go at it. And that could cost a lot of money upfront to get all of that and get the skills and all of that, right? And I also have to maintain that garage. I have to maintain the tools and make sureit's clean and make sure everything is organised sothat I can do a good job and everything,have electricity and all of that that's needed, right?

And then I can work on the cards myself. Now, that mentality, that sort of do-it-yourself mentality, is the way that we've always done things in it.We've hosted our own equipment; we've set up our own data centers; we've provided power and air conditioning. We had to have skills to manage the hardware that went with it. All right? There's a lot that went into that, and that was always the mentality. Now the other mentality is that if my car breaks down, I can take it to a company that offers that as a service. Okay? Like there's auto mechanic shops, they gotthe garage, they got the tools, theygot the people that have the skills. They can work on the car for me and fix it for a fee. And that is a concept that's basically like what you have with cloud computing. There are different phases of it, but ultimately that's the logic. Okay? So companies like Microsoft and Amazon have built, gone out, and set up these massive warehouses and data centres crammed with equipment. You're talking tonnes of server blades, CPUs, tonnes of CPUs, RAM storage, and network bandwidth, and they're offering that as a service. Okay? So let's draw this big cloud here, all right? This is going to be, we'll say, Microsoft's cloud. All right, let me make it a little bit bigger. There we go. Okay, so they've made their own; they've got their own equipment and their own data centers, and they're basically going to host equipment for us to use as customers. That's the idea, all right? These data centres are connected to the Internet, all right? There are different versions of actual government equipment and equipment for consumer use. Also, the education system can get access to it. There are a lot of different pieces to all of this, right? Okay, so I want to introduce you to a couple of acronyms. The first acronym is IAaS. IaaS is infrastructure as a service.

Okay. Infrastructure as a Service is the concept of hosting all the equipment and making that equipment available to consumers, okay? So for example, they will host all the equipment for you. They will maintain it. They will provide power, air conditioning, redundancy, and they'll keep the equipment updated. We can host things on their equipment. So you see these virtual machines over here? I can host those in their cloud, so I can host virtual machines, okay? They will also provide other resources, like virtual appliances. So you're getting into things like virtual load balancers. You're talking about virtual firewalls, okay? They've got virtual storage for backing things up, okay? They'll host databases there for you as a service. There are a lot of things they're going to host there for you. And the great thing about this is that you just pay for what you use. So if you don't use very much, you're not going to pay very much. I do consulting work. I have one client that basically has a virtual server running Server 2019, and they pay $30 a month. and they have a few people that hit it every day. It's not that expensive. Of course, you can get into the higher tiers. The other great thing about it is its elasticity. So if you've got a lot of things going on that server, then Microsoft can give you more CPU, more memory, more storage, and more network.

Of course you're going to pay for that. For the time being, their IaaS cloud is known as Azure. By the way, that's how I pronounce that. You may pronounce it differently. Azure. Azure. I've heard it pronounced "Asia." There are so many different names for it. I actually tried once to figure out the proper way to say that word. I actually watched the videos of theguys who created Azure, and guess what? They don't say it the same way, either. They call it something else, too. So that's how I say that word, okay? Azure. So Azure is their platform for dealing with all of this virtual hardware, basically, that you can store virtual things on like VMs and appliances, and you're basically paying for what you use, how much CPU you use, memory, storage, network, all that. Now there's another piece to this, okay? and it's called PaaS, and there's SaaS. Some people say it Pass and SAS. Pass is now a platform as a service. Platform as a Service is where they are hosting some kind of web-based platform and you have to configure it, set it up the way you want, deploy it the way you want, and configure it the way you want for your people, all right? And then essentially, they're giving you a platform with the tools to do what you need, but you have to use those tools. And then SAS, which is software as a service, is basically apps that are being hosted applications.Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, for example, are all available online.

Now their PaaS and SaaS platform is actually called Microsoft 365, okay? They used to call it Office 365, but it confused everybody because everybody thinks of Office, right? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, all that. But now they've changed it to Microsoft 365. And you'll discover that Office 365 is a part of that, and Office 365 is considered, believe it or not, a platform as a service because you can completely configure it, deploy the apps, and have Office Online and Office on the Web. That is your software as a service side of things, okay? Another component of this is things like Exchange Online, okay? so they're going to host the email stuff out there for you. They're going to host SharePoint Online, all right? You have something called One Drive for Business; that is their storage. And then you have teams, okay? While they were away, they were using Skype for Business and Skype for Business. They have teams, right? Teams are wonderful. It's a fantastic collaboration tool, as is everything else you use. And then you've also got a product called Intune. Intune is a Microsoft MDM Mam product. So mobile device management, mobile application management—this is their product when it comes to managing all of your devices. The great thing about Intune is that you can manage on-premise devices like this or cloud devices or Internet devices that are just connected to the internet, like smartphones, tablets, and things like that. Even devices that are in people's homes, if they allow you to, can be managed too. Intune is now also part of the Endpoint Manager configuration. So you're going to use a tool called Endpoint Manager to manage Intune, and it is related to Endpoint Configuration Manager. So the thing was that it confused everybody when it came out because it could do a lot of the same things that SCCM could, and so it confused everybody. So Microsoft renamed SCCM to Endpoint Config Manager, and Intune is now part of that as well. So you have a web-based portal that allows you to control both things,

okay? And so it makes it a whole lot easier because you can centrally control everything, as opposed to having to jump back and forth. Now another great thing you get with EndpointConfig managers is that you can do this thing called "co management," where you actually link the two together, and it can control Windows 10 devices, whether they're internal or out on the Internet. They can jump back and forth. And if the Windows Ten device is internal, then Endpoint Config Manager controls it. If the Windows 10 devices are on the Internet, then Intune will control them. Okay? Another aspect of this that I saved for last is something called Azure Ad. Azure AD is kind of the glue that ties these two things together. Your IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are all tied together with Azure ads. That is your directory service. And it is a completely different directory service than what we had on premise. On premise. They'll use an acronym called Adds, which is Active Directory Domain Services. if I could actually spell. All right. active directory domain services. Okay, wow. Lots of typos here. Okay, so DS stands for Active Directory Domain Services. That is your on-premise Active active directory.Azure ads are completely different. It was created using web-based tool programming. So you're dealing with a lot of your web-based SAML and what's called Open ID and Open Authorization. And it's a different language than what LDAP and Kerberos are built on.

Okay? Now, you can actually another thing that'sreally cool about this is you canactually link the two together and synchronize. So you can actually set up this thing called an Azure AD Connect Server, all right? And if you set that Azure Ad Connect Serverup, you can link your onprem Active Directory withthe cloud, and they can synchronise users, groups, passwords,all that stuff between the two, all right? And then you can achieve what is called SSO single sign-on, where somebody on premise can actually authenticate on premise as well as on the cloud at the same time. But just so you know, you get to decide on all that. This is not forced on you. You get to make that decision, and you also get to decide what gets synchronized. So if you don't want all your users synchronizing, nobody says they have to all be synchronized. You get to decide what's going to get synchronized. Okay? All right, so hopefully that gives you guys a halfway decent understanding now of just the basic foundations of sort of where things were and where we are. And of course, as you can imagine, the cloud is really where Microsoft is heading in the future, and that's definitely where they're putting all their time, effort, and energy. But hopefully that gives you guys a good foundation for how all that works. That's.

5. Creating a Microsoft 365 Subscription for practice

a free email account. Of course, if you got an email alreadythat's not assigned to a Microsoft 365 Azureaccount, then you could use that, obviously. But one thing you could simply do is go to somewhere like Outlook.com, Gmail, or Yahoo, create yourself a free email account, and from there you're going to go to this little URL right here. This is a tiny URL. Comproffice three, six, five, and e five, okay, so that'll take you right to the place where you can sign up for this. Okay. The only other thing you're going to need when you do this is cash; you don't need a credit card or anything like that. Because it will perform a verification, you will need a cell phone that can receive text messages. As far as I know, I've never seen a limit on how many accounts can be tied to a cell phone. I've probably got 30 accounts tied to my cellphone number myself, so I wouldn't worry too much about the fact that, well, I've used my cell phone with another account.

But you will have to have a cell phone because they'regoing to send a code to your cell phone, a onetime password, and you have to put that in. Okay, so we're not going to take a look at that. We'll take a look at the link and the steps, and I'll show you how to activate the EMS license, which is going to be important to get access to a lot of the security and compliance stuff. So when you put in the tiny URL link that I gave you, this is where you're going to end up. You'll be looking at this Office 365 E5 page, and from there we're going to click on Free Trial. It detects that you've already created a Microsoft 365 account. It's going to ask you if you want to use that. I'm going to say no. I would want to sign up myself. So then at that point, if you're signed into an existing account, it's going to log you out of that account, tell you to close your browser, and all that, and it'll redirect you. And then at that point, this is where you would put in your free email address that you've created. It'll ask for some personal information about you.

And then at that point, it will require that one-time password. So text your cell phone. Okay, so it's pretty easy; just fill out the form, and at that point you'll get your 30-day trial. But there's another step you have to do. Once you get logged in and signed into your free account, which again only takes a few minutes, you're going to go to Portal Azure.com, click the little menu button, click on Azure ActiveDirectory, and then go to Licenses. As you can see, if I look over here to the right, I've got an option that says "Get a free trial." We're going to click on it, get a free trial, and then what you're going to want is this Enterprise Mobility plus Security E-5 subscription. This is going to give you access to all the security things that we're going to be playing around with. So we dropped that down, and you would activate it. You need to give it about an hour to activate. Microsoft kind of says, "Oh, this will take effect very quickly," but what I've found is it takes longer than that to go through. so I would say give it about an hour to go through. The good news is that you'll be able to do most of what you'll be doing here at the start of this course with ease. But some of the later things, such as the Security Compliance Center, are going to be towards the end of the course. You won't be able to do that until this is fully and utterly activated. Don't believe it. It'll say it's activated. But you've got to give it time. It takes time before these features will show up. Once you've activated that, come over here to where it says all products, and you'll see Enterprising plus Security. You may not have all of these here. That's not a problem.

You don't need access to these things right here to get access to the stuff we're using in the course. The big one is this guy right here. You need to make sure that you assign your admin account to this subscription. Your admin account information is right up here. So you'd go to Enterprise.Ability plus security here. You would click "Assign." You would assign that to your admin account. Okay. Now how do you know that this has actually shown up? How do you know it's ready to go? Well, if you go to Portal.Microsoft.com, drop down Show All, and then click on Security, that's going to bring you to the Security Compliance Center. At that point, you'll see a bunch of options here that you can select. But keep in mind that regardless of if your EMS subscription is activated or not, you're going to see some options here anyway. The one you want to look for—that's sort of a guarantee that everything is activated—is this guy here, Ediscovery. If you don't see Ediscovery, then your subscription is not fully activated yet. So you need to give it some more time. Okay? Like I said, give it about an hour. Okay. Once that's done, you'll be able to do all the hands-on work that we do in the club and get a good bit of experience with everything. And again, you have access to all that for 30 days. So I highly encourage you to take the time to do that. But this is definitely a good way for you to really get down and dirty with Microsoft 365.

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