Depending on what options of Office 365 / SharePoint Online / Exchange Online you have chosen, you will see different things, but you get a dashboard.  Now depending on when you got Office 365 and where you live, this may look different.  That’s because Microsoft rolls out changes to the platform in stages. But basically you have the state of the services in the middle, admin links on the left and help on the right.

If you’re very new to the world of Office 365 and SharePoint, you will need some help getting going properly.  Basically how it works is, you buy licenses per user, then you assign those licenses to users, then you add those users to SharePoint so you can collaborate.

You can quickly access your dashboard by signing into portal.office.com; or your intranet environment by your company name you signed up with followed by sharepoint.com – so ours is letscollaborate.sharepoint.com for example.

The SharePoint Admin Centre is where you would manage how many portals you will have, how big they will be and what services and settings will be activated on them.  We really feel you should get professional help with this. It is not something you would magically understand if you are not familiar with the SharePoint world already.

Permissions are then allocated inside the site collections – that’s what you see above.  You need to do some planning to determine what site collections will needed and why. Once inside your main intranet (below), you go to Site Permissions and add the users as required so they can access the sites and information.  Again, this takes a lot of planning!  Call in the troops if you don’t know how to set up or plan for an intranet, we cannot stress this enough.