Office 365 – You can now use templates when creating new users

This has been a long awaited features which is now available in Office 365: the ability to use templates when creating new user accounts.

When using this feature you will be able to create new user account based setting from existing accounts.

This applies only for user accounts you are creating from the Office 365 admin portal (cloud account).

The deployment of this feature is obviously taking more time than expected as I can see it on some of the tenants I managed while on other it is still not there.

To start using this capability, logon to your Office 365 administration portal (https://admin.microsoft.com/) and ensure you are using the new admin center

Then go to the Users\Active users blade and access the User templates option

From there you can:

• Create new template
• Manage your existing template
• Create new account based on existing template

Create and manage user template

When you create a new template, you just have to name it, define the default domain (going to be used to set the UPN, email address…), manually or automatically defined password, usage location and licenses to be assigned (as some point this is overlapping with the group based licensing) and finally assigned administration roles and user details (physical address, department…)

Manage existing template

If you need to can update/delete existing template by selecting Manage template

From there you will be able to add new template, edit or delete existing ones

Create new account using the template

Once you have at least one user template, you can then create new account using this template by selecting the template from the User templates list and filling the specifics for the user (name, logon name…), everything else will be populated and greyed out by the template you have selected