I wanted to write this post to clear up any confusion about the process of managing an Azure EA, the Enrollment, Department, Account and Subscription. Look at the entire hierarchy and work down through the levels that is Microsoft Azure.
The Enrollment
Managed using http://ea.azure.com
At the very top-level from a licensing perspective, you can have multiple Azure Enrollments, here you can select the enrollment you want to work with. You need to be an Enterprise Administrator to access this. There can be an unlimited number of Enterprise Administrators.
The other thing you need to do is change the Enrollment Authentication Level to ‘Mixed Account‘ so that you have the ability to add both Microsoft Accounts and/or Work or School accounts as Account Administrators.
The Department
Also managed using http://ea.azure.com
Once you select the Enrollment you are working with, you then select ‘Department‘ at the top. This is where you can see all the departments in which you are the Department Administrator for and you can setup more departments which can be setup as a logical segmentation of a company or application.
The Account
To save some confusion, this part is not a generic account (like what a department and subscription is), but more so an individual account for a person, who will ultimately become the Azure Account Administrator. The AA can manage and setup Azure subscriptions, at which point will also become – by default – the Service Administrator for the subscription as well at the time of subscription creation.
Notice, this part is managed using two portals.
You will use http://ea.azure.com only to first setup the Account Administrator under the relevant department, whether it be a Microsoft Account or a Work/School (Organisational) account, this is where you do it.
At this stage, once you add in the account, it can take up to 24 hours for it to actually add itself in and will sit at ‘pending‘ for a while.
Once it goes through and gets setup, the email you used when adding the account, that person will get an email to confirm with a link to logon to the Azure Account portal.
Please note: at this point, even through that adding a work/school account from an Azure AD directory is an option, the ‘directory‘ doesn’t have to have any affiliation with the EA, nor does the Microsoft Account. In saying this, you can use an account from a new Azure AD directory, or an existing Azure AD directory, e.g. if you are using Office 365 and AD Connect to sync on-prem accounts to Azure AD, you can use any of these accounts.
Once the account has been completed being setup, the Account Administrator will get an email.
The Subscription
All Azure subscriptions can then be created and managed by the Account Administrator and this is all done by using the Azure Account portal http://account.windowsazure.com then by clicking on ‘Account‘ at the top.
From here you will notice you have the option of adding a new subscription.
Or, you can edit an existing subscription. If you click on an existing subscription, by default all Azure Enterprise based subscriptions are named ‘Microsoft Azure Enterprise‘. You have the option to ‘Edit Subscription Details‘.
Here you can rename the Azure subscription and change the Service Administrator to someone else. Remember that with all new Azure subscriptions which are created by the Account Administrator, Azure stamps the Account Administrator as the Service Administrator by default, this is where you change that.
The Azure Hierarchy
And this is the whole thing visually.
More details can be found on the Channel 9 website on the subject of Enterprise Azure Portal https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/EA.Azure.com