Understanding Delegated Administration ("On Behalf Of") in Office 365
One of the benefits of being a “Microsoft Cloud Accelerate” partner is the ability to offer delegated administration right from within your own Office 365 tenant. Delegated administration is you administrering a company account on behalf of one (or more) of your customers. As a delegated administrator, you can perform simple tasks such as adding users and resetting passwords, or more technical tasks such as adding a domain.
Two questions often comes up when delegated administration is on the agenda:
- How to invite/offer your customer to authorize you as a delegated administrator
- How to actually do the delegated administration
How to invite your customer to authorize you as a delegated administrator
Before you can start administering your customer's account, your customer must authorize you as a delegated administrator. To obtain your customers approval, you first send them an offer for delegated administration:
Click the "Partner" tab
Under "Offer delegated administration" click "Send delegated administration offers":
Go through the steps to end up with a customer ready email:
Send the mail and wait for your customer to approve the invitation.
Your customer will click the URL in the invitation and authorize you as a delegated administrator:
How to actually do the delegated administration
When you want to perform an administrative task for your customer, you can locate the account by searching for a user (name) or your customers domain name. If you are a delegated administrator for your customer's account, you can search for any domain name associated with the account.
Click the "Partner" tab
Type in e.g. the domain name:
When a matching domain name is found, a results page appears with action links at the top of the page. Click the link corresponding to the action you want (e.g. "Administer on behalf of"):
Thats it :-)
Note: As a Microsoft partner, you can see a list of your Office 365 customers on your MPN Partner Dashboard: https://partnerdashboard.microsoft.com/PartnerDashBoard/home.mvc/show/PartnerId= [MPN ID] #/#onlineServicesTab