When you create your tenant after getting Office 365, the associated account used to set it up initially has the admin privileges by default. This means that the user that set it all up in the beginning (the one who created a tenant in Office 365) has all the privileges and is called global administrator. But that user can also add other roles to delegate work without having to give access to the entire Office 365 admin center.
5 Admin Roles In Office 365
There are five administrator roles that are most important and worth discussing. The rest are the subset of these roles. These include: global, billing, user-management, services, and password.
Global Administrator:
This one we discussed at the start of this article. A global administrator has access to everything within the Office 365 subscription service, including adding more global administrators.
Billing administrator:
A user with the privileges of a billing administrator can see the office 365 subscription services, view company information, see and manage support, see service settings, and other billing-related data. They can also check other administrators but cannot add or modify themselves.
User-Management administrator:
This admin can view all the users, groups, and contacts within a tenant and can delete them if need be. One of the very important privileges a user-management admin has is that of setting the licenses for the users. They can also perform resetting of passwords and force users to sign out when needed.
Services Administrator:
This administrator has the access for the services setting, subscriptions, service health, and support tickets. They can also view but not modify: billing and subscription details, users, groups, and contacts.
Password-Administrator:
A password admin is almost similar to the user-management admin that we just mentioned above with one difference: they do not have the privilege of creating users, groups, or contacts. But they can view them and modify their passwords. They can also view a lot of other details like: service settings, company information, service health, and more. They can also manage billing, subscription services, and support tickets.
Here’s how to add roles from Office 365 Admin Center
- Go to the admin center and login as the global administrator
- Go to Roles à Roles à select the type of role you want to assign to a user à Select the ‘Assigned Admins’ à And then click ‘Add’
- Type the user name you want to make the admin and then click ‘Save.’ You can assign multiple users for the same role.
An alternative method is to go “Users” à to a specific user’s details à and then click “Manage Roles” to assign a role to that particular user. This is to make one specific user an admin and the method above is if you want to add multiple users for a role. You can also assign roles using PowerShell and that’s the most efficient approach in case you need to assign roles to hundreds of users. We will discuss that the next time in details.