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:

1. How to invite/offer your customer to authorize you as a delegated administrator
2. 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:

1. Click the “Partner” tab
   
2. Under “Offer delegated administration” click “Send delegated administration offers”:
    
   
   
    
   
3. Go through the steps to end up with a customer ready email:
   
   
    
   
4. 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.

1. Click the “Partner” tab
   
2. Under “Find and Assist” click “Lookup user or domain”
   
   
3. Type in e.g. the domain name:
   
   
    
   
4. 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