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Office 365: Delegating Administrative Roles

Anthony Hughs

2 min read

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Many Office 365 administrators don’t know that they can delegate some administrative tasks to users in their organizations. For example, one could grant a user ‘Password Administrator’ rights, which would share the load of resetting passwords, or ‘Service Administrator,’ which would allow the person to check if any Office 365 features are having issues.

The following administrator roles are available:

  • Billing administrator: Makes purchases, manages subscriptions, manages support tickets, and monitors service health.

Note: If you did not purchase Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises from Microsoft, you will not be able to make billing changes and therefore will not have the billing administrator role available to you. For billing issues, contact the administrator at the company where you purchased your subscription. 

  • Global administrator: Has access to all administrative features. The person purchases Office 365 for the firm becomes a global administrator. Only global administrators can assign other administrator roles. There can be more than one global administrator at your company.
  • Password administrator: Resets passwords, manages service requests, and monitors service health. Password administrators can reset passwords only for users and other password administrators.
  • Service administrator: Manages service requests and monitors service health.

Note: To assign the service administrator role to a user, the Global Administrator must first assign administrative permissions to the user in the service in question, such as Exchange Online, and then assign the service administrator role to the user in Office 365.

  • User management administrator: Resets passwords, monitors service health, and manages user accounts, user groups, and service requests. Some limitations apply to the permissions of a user management administrator. For example, he or she cannot delete a global administrator or create other administrators. Also, he or she cannot reset passwords for billing, global, and service administrators.
  • There’s also the Exchange administrator, Skype for Business Administrator, and SharePoint Administrator roles which can modify any value from within their respective control panels.

Choosing to delegate some of these responsibilities can be helpful at small firms when the administrator is unable to access a computer or is otherwise busy.