NOTE: Information listed here is good as of 2/6/2015 and is subject to change.
**** Video Updated on 7/7/2015 ****
This will look at the process to perform an IT Admin Takeover for an O365 Tenant. You may ask why you would need to do that. This relates to the Information Worker (IW) sign ups and the fact that what will get created is what I like to call a shadow tenant. It is a container for the accounts within O365, but from an organization perspective, you can’t really manage it or have any controls from an organization level.
The Admin Takeover allows an organization to actually signify that we do want to administrate the organization, and be able to have more control over the users and licenses. For Power BI, this will translate to admin functionality that you can do as an organization for the Power BI subscriptions. Currently with the Public Preview, those functions aren’t exposed yet, but they are coming.
You start by going to https://portal.office.com which will take you to the Office 365 Settings for the account you log in with. At the bottom of the left side, you will see an option called Become an admin.
When we click on that, we will see an option to verify that we are the owner of the domain we want to take over.
It will then ask us who manages the DNS. We can select that provider in the drop down box, or signify that you have someone else that does this.
Once you have selected your DNS provider, click on Next. It will then show us steps to create a TXT record for DNS. Based on your provider, it will present steps to try and walk you through if you aren’t familiar. Be mindful that providers will change their UI, and so the steps may not line up complete.
In my case, I needed to go to the Zone File section of my DNS.
From here I had to click on Add Record and choose a TXT record. The walkthrough page includes the values that you need for the TXT record. Once that is done we can save the information.
O365 indicates that this could take up to 72 hours to propagate. Click Done, verify now on the bottom of the O365 page.
And it worked! Now if we go to the O365 Portal, we will see the Admin Center and see Users, subscriptions and what not.
We can also see under Users that we have the two users that I signed up with for Power BI (asaxton and info).
We also don’t have any subscriptions at this point because we haven’t paid for anything. Under Licenses we do see Microsoft Power BI with 1,000,000 licenses. We don’t pay for that though.
We can also attach subscriptions to this service if wanted such as E3 or OneDrive for Business.
Adam W. Saxton | Microsoft Business Intelligence Server Escalation ServicesTwitter | YouTube