What is Delegated User Management?

As your organization grows, the size and complexity of the systems and tools you use to collaborate inside and outside of the organization also grows. While many organizations still maintain centralized management of SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, having one administration group keep track of and maintain off of the various roles and permissions can be a monumental task. Increasingly, organizations are pushing these administrative tasks down to business units and regional IT teams who better understand the immediate needs of the business.

While Microsoft has increasingly made it possible for IT teams to delegate specific roles within Azure and Microsoft 365 to additional administrators within the organization -- depending on the size, complexity, and growth of departments and project teams -- most organizations are looking for help in managing this process.

The out-of-the-box external sharing capabilities of Microsoft 365 are not scalable, and setting up and managing Azure B2B and the Azure portal can quickly become overwhelming, with an all-or-nothing approach to delegation. Employees need permissions management to be able to invite external customers and partners into essential collaboration activities -- but this activity requires governance oversight.

What Microsoft provides:

• Delegate administration in Azure Active Directory https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/roles-concept-delegation allows you to assign the least possible privilege to users to access their apps and perform their tasks, and place application management responsibilities on the existing Global Administrators.
• Azure Active Directory roles in the Microsoft 365 admin center https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/microsoft-365/admin/add-users/azure-ad-roles-in-the-mac?view=o365-worldwide provides a list of over 30 Azure AD roles, with even more available in the Azure portal.
• Assign admin roles https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/microsoft-365/admin/add-users/assign-admin-roles?view=o365-worldwide walks you through the steps to assign these delegated roles.
• Administrator roles by admin task in Azure Active Directory https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/roles-delegate-by-task provides an even more granular review of the roles that can be delegated through Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)