Microsoft Teams to Introduce New Administrative Units for Streamlined Management

Key Takeaways:

• Microsoft will soon add administrative units (AUs) in Teams admin center to facilitate delegated administration based on location, department, or business unit.
• AUs enable role-based access control (RBAC) for Teams administrators, allowing them to manage users, groups, devices, and policies at a granular level within their designated units.
• This feature will become generally available for commercial customers in September 2024.

Microsoft is set to add support for administrative units (AUs) in the Teams admin center. This new feature will allow organizations to delegate administrative roles to a subset of users based on specific criteria such as location, department, or business unit, streamlining management processes effectively.

Administrative units are a way to partition an organization into smaller and more manageable units. This capability makes it easier to manage resources and apply policies at a granular level. For instance, administrative units could be used to delegate permissions to IT admins for each school within a university.

Currently, Microsoft Teams admins cannot delegate administration to role-based access control (RBAC) roles. However, this upcoming release will allow Global admins to assign various RBAC roles to administrative units, such as Teams Administrator, Teams Device Administrator, Teams Communication Administrator, Teams Communication Support Engineer, Teams Communication Support Specialist, and Teams Telephony Administrator. These roles will exclusively manage users, groups, and devices within their designated administrative units.

How Microsoft Teams admins will manage administrative units?

The RBAC roles will have access to the user’s list page for performing various administrative tasks related to policies, devices, and meetings for AU users. They will also be able to assign direct routing phone numbers to AU users, allowing them to make and receive calls through Microsoft Teams.

Additionally, these RBAC roles will be able to access reports for users within the AU and manage call quality data on the Call Quality Dashboard. They will also have the ability to view the policy list pages to allocate policies to any users or groups assigned to the AU.

Microsoft plans to start rolling out this update to commercial customers in August 2024, with general availability expected in early September 2024. Administrative units will be accessible to Teams Global admins by default but will require setup in the Microsoft Entra portal.