What can your partner do on your Office 365 Tenant?

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In Office 365 you have the option to add a partner to your Office 365 tenant. In this article I explain what the partner sees and what can they do.

What is this option about?

In your Office 365 portal you see ‘Partner relationships’, here you will find a list of Microsoft Partners that have delegated access to your tenant. The Microsoft partner can ask for delegated access to your tenant, you cannot invite the partner yourself.

This option gives your partner the ability to assist you with the administration of your tenant.

The invite

Your partner can create an invite email to request delegated administration from there partner portal. They can also do this with the creation of a purchase offer. The invite looks like the image below.

When you click on the link in the email you are sent to the Office 365 portal and asked to sign-in if you are not already. You must sign-in with an account that has portal admin rights. After that you are asked if you want to accept your partner for delegated administration like the image below.

After you accepted this invitation the partner has access to your tenant. These are the terms of delegated administration (https://g.microsoftonline.com/0BX20en/353)

What options do you have?

When you have accepted the invite your partner has access to your tenant with their own corporate accounts. Only the users with partner rights on your partner’s tenant can access your tenant. By default, only the partner’s tenant admins have this option. They can give users the right to administer their clients by assigning this to them.

As a tenant admin you can only see who you gave delegated administration and their contact details. You also have the option to remove your partner.

What can your partner do?

With the above steps you gave your partner access to your tenant and help you solve any problems on your tenant.

The partner also has their own dashboard and can see a number of things

  • Your contact details
  • The health status of your tenant
  • View and create service requests
  • Licenses (Assigned and valid)
  • Domains (Name, Status and Capabilities)
  • Links to manage your tenant

With the ’links to manage your tenant’ the partner can go to the different administration pages of your tenant.

Your partner now has almost the same rights as the tenant administrator, but not

  • Delete other partners
  • Buy licenses
  • Add and configure domains
  • Configure users

I hope this gave you an overview what it means to give your partner delegated administration.