Designating Managers and Adding Direct Reports with Exchange in Office 365 Enterprise (E-3) Preview

Updated 7/20/2012: Added “Alternative Method for Adding the Manager/ReportsTo Property Value” section at the end of this post and the following paragraph:

Thanks to John Palmer of Citrius for his assistance on resolving an issue with the DirectReports list. (See the Can't Add Users as DirectReports in the Exchange Admin Portal thread in the Using the Office 365 Enterprise Preview forum.

If you don’t have a current Office 365 subscription and would rather use the free Office 365 Enterprise (E-3) Preview version, substitute the following steps for those in the A Guided Tour of the Windows Azure Active Directory Developer Preview Sample Application post’s “Designating Managers and Adding Direct Reports with Exchange” section:

1. Open the Office 365 Preview Admin Center:

2. Click Add New Users to open the New User Details section and type employee information:

3. Click Next to display the Settings page, accept the No option, and select the country in which the user is located, United States for this example:

4. Click Next to display the Licenses page and accept the default selection of all available features:

5. Click Next to Display the Email page and accept the default Adminstrator’s email account:

6. Click Create to display the Results page:

7. Repeat steps 2 through 6 for SalesPerson2 through SalesPerson4 and Manager. Click the + (Add) button in the Manage Users and Groups page to add the second and later user.

8. Optionally assign the Manager user the User Management Administrator role:

9. The users list appears as follows when you’re done:

Tip: See the “Alternative Method for Adding the Manager/ReportsTo Property Value to User Accounts” section near the end of this post.

10. Open the Admin menu at the top of the page (refer to step 1) and click the Exchange item to open the Recipients list:

Note: Hopefully the Office 365 team will hire a graphic designer with some awareness of CSS to fix the above and following ugly pages.

11. Double-click a Recipent item to open a detail form, click the Organization button in the navigation page, type the Title, Department, and Company name in the text boxes:

12. Click the Browse button to the right of the Manager text box to open the Select Manager form:

13. Select Manager for SalesPersons and your Administrative account for Manager and click the OK button to close the form.

14. Repeat steps 11, 12 and 13 for each employee. When done, double click the Manager recipient in the list to display Direct Reports in the Manager form’s Organization page:

15. Open the Admin menu and Choose Office 365 Preview to return to the Office 365 Preview Dashboard.

Alternative Method for Adding the Manager/ReportsTo Property Value to User Accounts

If you are adding one or two users, you might find the following alternative process simpler that that of steps 10 through 13 above:

1. In the Office 365 Preview Admin Center, select Users and Groups from the navigation pane:

2. Click a user’s Display Name to open the Assign Licenses page for the user, which gains a More button in the Navigation pane:

3. Click More to open the Additional Service-Specific Settings page:

4. Click the Edit Exchange Properties button to open the General page for the selected user:

Note: The above screen capture has been edited to reduce the length of the absurdly long text boxes.

5. Click the Organization link to open the required form and perform steps 11, 12 and 13 of the preceding section.

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