After setting up a Microsoft Office 365 tenant, you created a user with global administrator permissions on your tenant. There are several roles and administrative permissions that you can assign to user accounts based on the access requirements for each workload. You can assign, for example, the Exchange administrator role to the person who is managing the Exchange workload and assign the SharePoint administrator to a person of another department to manage SharePoint. With this separation of roles, you have more granular security in your tenant, without giving full access to all the workloads in the tenant. The available roles that you can assign to users are as follows:
- Global administrator
- Billing administrator
- Exchange administrator
- SharePoint administrator
- Password administrator
- Skype for Business administrator
- Service administrator
- User management administrator
- Reports reader
- Dynamics 365
- Dynamics 365 service administrator
- Power BI administrator
More details about these roles are available at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/About-Office-365-admin-roles-da585eea-f576-4f55-a1e0-87090b6aaa9d?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US. All these roles are based on Azure AD, where you can also set them up and assign additional roles, such as the following:
- Billing administrator
- Compliance administrator
- Conditional access administrator
- CRM service administrator
- Device administrator
- Directory reader
- Directory synchronization account
- Directory writer
- Exchange service administrator
- Global administrator/Company administrator
- Guest inviter
- Intune service administrator
- Mailbox administrator
- Password administrator/Helpdesk administrator
- Power BI service administrator
- Privileged role administrator
- Security administrator
- Security reader
- Service support administrator
- SharePoint service administrator
- Skype for Business administrator
- User account administrator
You can find more information at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-assign-admin-roles-azure-portal. To access the Office 365 Admin center, go through the following steps:
- Go to http://portal.office.com or directly to https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/homepage
- Log in with credentials that have admin privileges
- Select the Admin menu
- Go to the Admin centers drop-down on the left-hand menu:
In the home page of the Admin center, you have several options, such as the following:
- Home—landing page
- Users—manage users
- Groups—manage groups
- Resources—manage resources
- Billing—manage billing
- Support—manage support
- Settings—manage global settings
- Setup—set up services
- Reports—manage and view reports
- Health—view service health status
- Admin centers—manage other services
In each section, you'll find the tasks available to manage each piece of your Office 365 tenant.