First off, you must have at least powershell (PS) 2.0 to finally execute the MSOL commands. In the examples below, I'm executing the commands within Windows 2008 R2, which OOTB comes with vs2.0 so as long as you're running above Windows 2008 R2, then you're good. You can double-check by running the $PSVersionTable command within the terminal to determine the PS version ('PSVersion').

The first command you need to execute is the Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Force command. This will allow you to down the O365 scripts to your Windows PS terminal with the assumption that the O365 tenant is signed by Microsoft (as MSFT is the proprietor, it obviously is signed!)

The next command, $LiveCred Get-Credential, allows you to store your admin credentials. This doesn't to be specifically $LiveCred. You just need to ensure that the variable used is the same variable within the upcoming commands. You will be presented with a popup window in which you enter in your admin credentials.

The next command $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

This command will initiate the authentication between O365 and your computer by using the variable you just created. Because O365 needs to resolve the ps.outlook.com Uri, you must also ensure that you pass the -AllowRedirection parameter within the command. As you can see within the screenshot the connection is redirected, so the yellow warning is in fact a good thing. Assuming the response comes back error-free, it's time to check if the PSSession was successful, which is the second command within the screenshot, Get-PSSession. This command will return all the sessions (regardless if they are active or broken).

By default, you are only allowed to have 3 sessions that are created so from time to time, you may need to remove the sessions by executing, Remove-PSSession -id 6 assuming that the session ID you want to remove is 6. I've seen other blogs that use the connectionUri as -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-LiveID/ though both seem to work.

At the moment, your current powershell windows is not aware of the most updated o365 commands available. So once your O365 session is established, you can in fact import all the O365 commands available into your powershell terminal by running the Import-PSSession $Session -AllowClobber | Out-Null command. this is done by using the Import-PSSession command. You van also use the -AllowCobber to ensure all the commands are imported.

The other MSOL commands you may want is from the Azure Active Directory, which are different from Step 4. You can do this by executing the Import-Module MSOnline and connect-msolservice -credential $LiveCred respectively.

Now you're all setup to do whatever you want. The example below is how to view the current users within your O365 environment by executing the Get-MsolUser -All | measure command

Finally, you can use the active session by creating a new uer within your environment. The cmdlet below is a quick demonstration on how to create the user 'David Redfern' with the UPN of the 'tenant'.onmicrosoft.com suffix. New-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName dredfern2@montgomerytest.onmicrosoft.com -DisplayName "David Redfern" -FirstName "David" -LastName "Redfern"

Below is the collective commands used throughout this blog post Comments below please

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