The Office 365 admin center includes the following areas:
Note:
Many of these tasks can also be done using the Azure Active Directory module for Windows PowerShell.     
  
Area        

Purpose        
  
Getting started pane

This  pane is available for the first 30 days. It includes links and wizards  to get you started using Office 365, including links to videos, a setup  wizard, and software to download.
  
Dashboard

This  is the landing page for Office 365 administrators. You can see a quick  overview of your service health and usage, and access helpful resources  for administering Office 365.
  
Setup

This page provides step-by-step setup guidance, and includes options for basic and custom setup.
  
Users & groups

This  is the central place to do most tasks related to users and groups. You  can add, edit, or delete users, reset passwords, assign licenses, set up  security groups, and manage any delegated administrators.
You can also use this page to set up single sign-on and directory synchronization. For more information, see User Account Management.
  
Domains

This  is the central place to manage your Office 365 domains. You can add or  remove domains, view DNS settings, and troubleshoot domain-related  issues. For more information, see Domains.
  
Licensing

You  can view the details of your subscriptions and their term end dates,  view the number of assigned licenses, and renew subscriptions.
  
External sharing

This  is the central place to manage your users’ ability to collaborate with  external contacts. You can allow users to share access to their Exchange  calendars and SharePoint sites and documents with people in external  organizations. You can also enable users to communicate with people  outside of your organization using Lync.
  
Service settings

The  Office 365 admin center contains links to commonly used Exchange Online  service settings, as well as password, community participation, and  mobile settings. Additional service settings are managed in the Exchange  admin center, Lync admin center, and SharePoint admin center.

• For more information about the Exchange admin center, see Administration and Management in the Exchange Online service description.
• For more information about the Lync admin center, see Lync Online Administration and Management in the Lync Online service description.
• For more information about the SharePoint admin center, see IT Professional in the SharePoint Online service description.

Service health

You  can view service health for all your services, a historical view of  incidents that affected your service, and upcoming planned maintenance.  You can also sign up for an RSS feed for service incidents.
  
Reports

You  can view reports for all your services. The reports are grouped by the  services included in your subscription.
  
Support

You  can search for answers, view solutions to common issues, and access  troubleshooting tools. You can create a new service request online or  review existing service requests. If you prefer to call Support, this  page includes contact information. 
  
Purchase services

Purchase additional subscriptions.

Office 365 portal
Azure Active Directory module for Windows PowerShell
The  Azure Active Directory module for Windows PowerShell includes cmdlets  that you can use to manage domains and users. For more information see Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Office 365.
Exchange  Online and SharePoint Online modules for Windows PowerShell can be used  to administer those services. For more information, see Exchange Online cmdlets, and Introduction to the SharePoint Online management shell.
Azure Rights Management (RMS)
Azure  Rights Management (RMS) provides content authors with the ability to  protect content by adding limitations such as who can open, modify,  copy, print, forward, or take other actions, which is known as  Information Rights Management (IRM). All Office 365 users can view  IRM-protected content. For more information, see Rights Management.

“My servers run on Linux. My team knows how to manage Linux  servers and networks. It just makes sense for my switches to run on  Linux too.”

What most people don’t know is that many high-end network switches already run on Linux.
Switches from Cisco®, Extreme Networks® and Arista®  use Linux to run their switch hardware (the operating system is hidden  behind abstractions and APIs). As well, most of these share the same  switching silicon products from Broadcom® and Intel®.
We are in the midst of a major transformation in networking. Innovation from companies like Cumulus Networks® and Edge-Core® are leading the way, disrupting the way new networks are deployed and old networks are upgraded.
In my role as head of product engineering at Tuangru,  almost every small-to-mid size hosting service provider I talk to is  considering open networking. Why? Because it just makes sense.
Open network hardware is more affordable and easy to acquire. The  Linux software is familiar and, in most cases, admins prefer it over the  next CLI and syntax versions available.
The rise of DevOps and cloud technologies like OpenStack are driving  higher levels of automation and uniformity. Servers and switches have  become less discernible–servers are hosting virtual network fabrics and  switches are behaving like servers. As well, the reference designs are  there, and are proven and hardened in the field.
Here are a few things to consider in deploying open networking technology:
Think big, start small.  Open network hardware is powerful and cutting edge. Linux is familiar to  most admins. However, you must plan your deployment in a measured and  deliberate way. Train your staff and familiarize yourself with the  capabilities of the hardware and software. I recommend to our clients to  start with one to two racks, and grow from there.
Current network topology vs. open networking. There  may be differences between your current network topology and what it  may look like when you move to open networking.  Communicate and  understand your desired outcomes from a technology, cost and business  perspective. This will help drive the right conversation to determine  the right solution for you.
32 Port 40GB switch is not a $250K router. Yes, it  is capable of BGP, OSPF routing and firewall functions, but it is  primarily a network switch. Appreciate the capabilities and limitations  of the hardware and proceed wisely.
Invest in training. You may have a team of Linux  rock stars, but don’t let that cloud your judgment. Your admins can  benefit from network training, while your network staff can benefit from  Linux training. Cumulus Networks offers valuable half-day training  sessions that can help increase the domain knowledge in open networking  amongst your staff.
Open networking has arrived. It is driving hardware innovation along  with new applications and services that meet the needs of hosting  service providers. Price, technology and performance–it’s all there.
Rami Jebara, SVP of Product Engineering, Tuangru
Rami oversees product engineering and software development at  Tuangru, a technology company that offers a smarter, faster and cheaper  way for service providers to procure data center hardware. Tuangru is an  official partner of Cumulus Networks.

OpenStack is a very popular open source technology stack used to  build private and public cloud computing platforms. It powers clouds for  thousands of companies like Yahoo!, Dreamhost, Rackspace, eBay, and  many more.

Why drives its popularity? Being open source, it puts cloud builders  in charge of their own destiny, whether they choose to work with a  partner, or deploy it themselves. Because it is Linux based, it is  highly amenable to automation, whether you’re building out your network  or are running it in production. At build time, it’s great for  provisioning, installing and configuring the physical resources. In  production, it’s just as effective, since provisioning tenants, users,  VMs, virtual networks and storage is done via self-service Web  interfaces or automatable APIs. Finally, it’s always been designed to  run well on commodity servers, avoiding reliance on proprietary vendor  features.
Cumulus Linux fits naturally into an OpenStack cloud, because it  shares a similar design and philosophy. Built on open source, Cumulus  Linux is Linux, allowing common management, monitoring and  configuration on both servers and switches. The same automation and  provisioning tools that you commonly use for OpenStack servers you can  also use unmodified on Cumulus Linux switches, giving a single  pane of glass for automation and monitoring. And Cumulus Linux runs on a  wide variety of hardware from 5 different hardware manufacturers, so  you can utilize the same multi-vendor, commodity approach to procure  your network that you do for your server hardware.
The Cumulus Linux OpenStack Validated Solution Guide will show you  how to build OpenStack clouds ranging from a simple, single rack proof  of concept to a full, scalable data center cloud environment. Installing  and configuring both the network and the servers is fully automated;  once the servers and switches are racked and cabled, simply insert a USB  drive with the Cumulus Linux installer image into one of the switches,  and power on the cluster. The switches will install Cumulus Linux using ONIE,  then configure themselves using zero touch provisioning (ZTP). The  switches then PXE install Linux onto the servers, and use Puppet to  install and configure the various OpenStack components, such as Nova,  Nova-net, Glance, Cinder, Keystone and Horizon. In mere minutes after  powering on the cluster, you’ll be starting VMs on your new OpenStack  cloud!

One of the questions I’ve encountered in talking to our customers has  been “What environments are a good example of working on top of the  Layer-3 Clos design?”  Most engineers are familiar with the classic  Layer-2 based Core/Distribution/Access/Edge model for building a data  center.  And while that has served us well in the older client-server  north-south traffic flow approaches and in smaller deployments, modern  distributed applications stress the approach to its breaking point.   Since L2 designs normally need to be built around pairs of devices,  relying on individual platforms to carry 50% of your data center traffic  can present a risk at scale.  On top of this you have to have a long  list of protocols that can result in a brittle and operationally complex  environment as you deploy 10’s of devices.
Hence the rise of the L3 Clos approach allowing for combining many  small boxes, each carrying only a subset of your traffic, along with  running industry standard protocols that have a long history of  operational stability and troubleshooting ease.  And, while the approach  can be applied to many different problems, building a practical  implementation of a problem is the best way to show it to be true.  With  that in mind we recently setup a Hadoop cluster leading to a solution  validation guide we are publishing with our new release.
Big Data analytics is becoming increasingly common across businesses  of all sizes.  With the growth of genomic, geographic, social-graph,  search indexing and other large data sources, the ability for a single  computer to process across these sets in a reasonable time has  diminished.  Distributed processing models like Hadoop have become  increasingly the way to approach the data, breaking down the processing  into steps that can be distributed along with the data across the  compute nodes.
Many of the Hadoop solutions being published have been built around  assuming a high cost of the network, so they have focused on 1Gig  Ethernet attached servers, pressing the issues of locality to keep  traffic on the same ToR and optimizing keeping traffic off the network.   And while the speed of even 10Gig Ethernet can not keep up with locally  attached storage, being able to build a low-to-no oversubscription  network fabric at 10Gig and higher, in concert with most Big Data class  servers shipping with integrated 10Gig Ethernet on the motherboard  (LOM), the prices to accomplish this rival solutions built around 1Gig  Ethernet and remove your Big Data results from having to be so tied to  the locality of the data in your environment.
When it comes to building a network for Hadoop, we chose the  enterprise grade Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) driven by Hortonworks  as the platform to stand up and test for a new validated solution.   Hortonworks, being a major contributor to open source initiatives  (Apache Hadoop, HDFS, Pig, Hive, HBase, Zookeeper), has extensive  experience managing production level Hadoop clusters.  Given the open  nature of both Cumulus Linux and Hortonworks we were able to stand up  our environment quickly and validate the operations on the topology.  As  a follow-on to this project, by combining in the automation powers of  tools like Ansible, we will have a demo in Cumulus Workbench to show how  you can automate, both on the network and server, the environment and  to deploy using a single tool.  Keep your eyes out for it.

Features

 

Feature	Office 365 Business Essentials	Office 365 Business Premium	Office 365 Enterprise E1 Office 365 Education E1 Office 365 Government E1	Office 365 Enterprise E3 Office 365 Education E3 Office 365 Government E3	Office 365 Enterprise E4 Office 365 Education E4 Office 365 Government E4	Office 365 Enterprise K1 Office 365 Government K1
Administer Office 365 by using the Office 365 admin center	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Administer Office 365 by using the Office 365 portal	No	No	No	No	No	No
Manage core service settings from Office 365	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Use Windows PowerShell to manage Office 365	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Protect content by using Azure RMS	No	No	No1	Yes	Yes	No1