The Speed Runner’s Beginner Lab to the Azure Cloud: Lab 01 — Manage Microsoft Entra ID Identities

In pursuit of the AZ-104, we must become accustomed to Microsoft Entra ID.

This is the first of many labs where we will get hands-on experience with Microsoft services.

LAB SCENARIO

Your organization is building a new lab environment for pre-production testing of apps and services. A few engineers are being hired to manage the lab environment, including the virtual machines.

To allow the engineers to authenticate by using Microsoft Entra ID, you have been tasked with provisioning users and groups. To minimize administrative overhead, membership of the groups should be updated automatically based on job titles.

CREATE USER ACCOUNTS

The first thing we want to do is create the user accounts.

Once in the **Azure Portal**, we can select Microsoft Entra ID:

We can go to Users:

From here we can select “Create new user”:

The details for the new user is:

• User principal name: az104-user1
• Display name: az104-user1
• Job title: IT Lab Administrator
• Department: IT
• Usage location: United States

Review:

INVITE EXTERNAL USER

Now to invite external users.

An external user is someone who is typically outside the company who is being invited to access internal resources.

Invite the external user per the screenshots below:

Now we can see that the user has invited. We can also see that this is a different type of account:

This is the email that the external user receives:

This is the dashboard, which would typically have content, that the external user would view:

CREATE GROUPS AND ADD MEMBERS

Now we can add these members to a group called ‘IT Lab Administrators’.

In an enterprise environment we could create a dynamic group, which will automatically be assigned to users per the property we specify.

For example we could have a group that is dynamically assigned to everyone with the department of IT.

Since we are using the free version we don’t have the dynamic membership type available, therefore we’ll just stick with ‘Assigned’.

Make yourself the owner of the group:

If we were to select Dynamic, we would have to create a rule that would dynamically assign the group to users who had a particular property. For example:

(user.department -eq "IT")

Continuing on, add yourself and all the users we created:

This concludes our first Azure lab.

Creating these accounts establishes a solid lab foundation and completes our first hands-on step toward the AZ-104 certification.