Creating a new organization in Office 365 is relatively easy. You need a valid domain, a unique tenant name and if you want to use it beyond the 30 days trial period a valid credit card.

Before creating (or provisioning) a new tenant you have to select the Business Plan that will match your business needs. You can find a nice overview of all Office 365 Business Plans on the Microsoft site via http://bit.ly/CompareAllO365BusinessPlans.

When you scroll down you’ll the Business Plans that have a free trial available. In this blog post I’ll focus on the Enterprise E3 plan.

When you click Free Trial at the bottom of the page you can configure a new tenant in Office 365 with a 30 days trial period. You need to enter you name, email address, telephone number and organization name as shown in the following figure.

The next step is to create your first user ID. This will automatically the Global Administrator of your Office 365. I always recommend not using a regular user for this, but create a dedicated administrator with an appropriate name like admin or administrator.

You also have to enter the name of your tenant. For Exchange Online and Lync Online you won’t see this name again, but for SharePoint (and OneDrive for Business) it’s a different story as the name of tenant is used in the URL, like https://inframan-my.sharepoint.com/personal/<username>, so select your tenant name carefully.

Microsoft also wants to know you’re not a robot or something faking tenant creation and texting is used for this. Enter your mobile phone number and a text message with a response code is sent to you. Enter this code and click Create my account as shown in the following figure.

Your new tenant in Office 365 including your first administrative account is now being created.

Please note that it can take some time before everything is finished. The actual tenant and the administrative account will be finished in a minute, but replication across the Office 365 services, and the creation of the default tenant DNS records can take some time, I always mention it can take up to 24 hour to be fully activated. However, the latter will be done in the background, so after maybe a minute you’ll see something like this:

And when you click You’re ready to go you are entering the Microsoft Online Portal:

That’s all it takes to setup your new Office 365 organization. In my next blog I’ll go into detail on how to create new domains and users, both with the GUI and with PowerShell.