The dashboard

In order to access the Exchange Admin Portal, you'll most likely need to go to the Office 365 Administration Portal and enter via Exchange in the Admin Centers. (This was covered in Chapter 1,  The Office 365 Administration Portal.) It is possible to connect directly via https://outlook.office365.com/ecp/ as well. Don't leave off the ecp at the end; that's what distinguishes the Exchange admin Portal from your Outlook web mail:

Exchange admin dashboard

Once you're in, you'll be presented with a dashboard that shows direct links for every main page on the portal, organized under headings, and a side navigation that takes you to a page for that heading.

We've selected the heading Recipients on the left navigation. Within Recipients, there are six tabs: Mailboxes, Groups, Resources, Contacts, Shared, and Migration. If we'd selected Mailboxes directly from the dashboard screen, we'd come to the same place. The other headings and dashboard direct links work the same way:

Mailboxes,...