Disclaimer: These posts represent my own small experiments with the Windows Store for Business. I only have visibility of what’s publicly on the internet and I’m learning here so apply a pinch of salt to these posts as I try to figure things out. You should always check with the official documentation here.

Following on from that previous post, if I’m going to make use of the Windows Store for Business then I need some kind of organization for me to administer.

I don’t have one. I’m not a school or a business or anything like that but the joy of this cloud-first world is that I can simply make one up in order to try things out and use the same infrastructure that a huge enterprise or a tiny business would use.

Microsoft has these made-up companies like Contoso or Northwind Traders or somesuch but I’ll have to make up my own and so I’ll call it;

“Backstreets Software”

as that doesn’t seem to impinge on anyone’s naming based on a quick Bing search.

Because Backstreets Software doesn’t have some kind of on-premise Active Directory to re-use, I’m going to kick them off in the cloud and create an Azure Active Directory which (AFIAK) involves using the ‘classic’ Azure management portal rather than the new portal.

So, off I went to https://manage.windowsazure.com and created myself an Active Directory;

And I filled in the dialog boxes;

and I had a directory and the full power of being the global administrator for that directory.

I’m in business! Ok, perhaps not but, with that in place, I wanted to add some users that I can play around with so I added 3 users to my setup;

Jane Johnson (jane@backstreetssoftware.com)

Simon Sturgeon (simon@backstreetssoftware.com)

Ivan Indiana (ivan@backstreetssoftware.com)

And so now my little organisation has grown in terms of staff in just its first few minutes. I set all of these users up as ‘User’ within my directory and here’s my new staff list;

The intention here is that Simon and Ivan are meant to represent my user community whereas Jane is meant to be my IT Pro who manages apps for the other two folks.

I wanted to make sure that I could set up Windows 10 machines for Simon and Ivan to use and the path of least resistance would seem to be to set up virtual machines running Windows 10 on Azure and so I went off and created a Resource Group (in the new portal) hoping that it would make things easy to get rid of at a later stage;

And then I created a couple of Windows 10 Virtual Machines in that resource group going for all the defaults that I could go for.

I think that I only get these Virtual Machine templates because I’m using my MSDN subscription, I’m not sure but this was my initial choice;

But then I realized that these are for build 10240 of Windows 10 and upgrading a machine running Enterprise 10240 isn’t so easy and so I decided to try for this machine instead;

And I made sure that I was using the resource manager for the deployment model;

And made both Simon and Ivan machines;

Putting them both onto A3 Basic sized instances and going with defaults for just about everything else and that got me to the point where I had a machine for Ivan and another for his colleague Simon.

While those virtual machines were deploying in Azure, I figured that I might be able to go over to the Windows Store for Business and sign up and so off I went to the UK Windows Store for Business

and I got a bit stuck as to whether I should be signing up or signing in. I had a read of the docs over here and it seemed to suggest that;

So, it sounds like I need to make sure that whoever signs up here is the global admin for the Backstreets Software and so I went back to Azure AD and promoted Jane;

Then went back to the Windows Store for Business to see if I could ‘Sign Up’ as Jane.

Which gave me;

And, after a couple of ‘wrong Azure account’ type browser sign-in problems that I get all the time, I got logged into the Windows Store for Business as Jane and dutifully accepted the agreement;

And the website went off to do some bits and pieces for me and gave me;

Great – Jane’s in! I did a quick lap around what I could see in the Store and I thought it was easier to record this as a little screen capture (no audio) than a set of bitmaps and so here that is;

Ok, so I’ve got an empty Windows Store for Business – next it’d be good to see how this looks to my users Ivan and Simon and how Jane can start to get some apps and assign them for use – I’ll follow that up in the next post.