Microsoft 365 All Tenants list is rolling out
Published Oct 06 2020 09:42 AM 61K Views
Microsoft

Did you know that more than one-third of admins that use the Microsoft 365 admin center manage multiple tenants. This applies to two-thirds of enterprise customers and the majority of partners that manage Microsoft 365 tenants for their customers. Historically, the Microsoft 365 admin center was built for single-tenant admins, but recently we began creating experiences for admins who manage multiple tenants.

 

We’re thrilled to announce that a new multi-tenant management experience called All tenants is now rolling out to Microsoft 365 customers. The All tenants list is specifically for admins that manage two or more Microsoft 365 tenants, including:

 

  • Partners who manage on behalf of
  • Merger and acquisition scenarios
  • Separate test and production environments
  • Regulatory requirements for multiple tenants

 

We have created a unified form of management that allows admins the ability to manage multiple tenants from a single pane of glass, helping them to save time every single day; in fact, the more tenants they manage, the more time they’ll save. We’re also extending support of our multi-tenant management features to include Azure Active Directory B2B In the coming months. Our goal is to help admins and partners with multiple tenants spend less time juggling, and more time doing.

 

The experiences we have built enable admins with multiple tenants to:

 

  • move quickly between tenants using the Organization Switcher (also called the Tenant Switcher);
  • assess service health, service requests, products, and billing across multiple tenants; and
  • understand admin setup task activity across multiple tenants.

All tenants provides insights about tenants which need your attention:

AT1.png

 Along with the tenant switcher, the multi-tenant management experience adds the ability to switch between tenants efficiently.

AT2.png

 

The All tenants list is rolling out now, and once available, you will need to log in with a partner admin account and soon will include admin accounts that have been invited to manage multiple tenants through Azure B2B.

 

We will continue to work on scenarios and experiences specifically for admins that manage multiple tenants. You can learn more about why we’re investing in these experiences in our recent video, Multi-tenant management in the Microsoft 365 admin center​.

 

 

Let us know what you think of the new experience using the feedback button in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and let us know what else we can do for you.

 

As an aside, if you're a partner, check out the announcement for Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, a new experience in private preview that makes it easier for partners to deliver managed services at scale to small and medium-sized customers.

31 Comments

Looking forward to using it.

Silver Contributor

Is it only about the switcher? Because "assess service health, service requests, products, and billing across multiple tenants" sounds like Lighthouse feature that is still in development. This is confusing. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/small-and-medium-business-blog/announcing-microsoft-365-light...

Iron Contributor

I’m curious whether new features will be available for tenants hosted in China to allow IT admins to manage their digital assets within and outside of China from one place.

Brass Contributor

I feel like this could get confusing and is asking for mistakes to be made. I quite like the segmentation of using easily identifiable browser profiles, and don't see how this will be any quicker really?

Brass Contributor

The faster switching menu has been a godsend! This new functionality sounds interesting, but, can't see much detail in the screenshot - Look forward to trying it.

 

Can I please make a suggestion - it would be awesome to see the switcher within more portals (e.g. AAD), as there is still a lot of back and forth needed from time to time.

 

Also, it is great to see Microsoft making progress on this, but, can I ask... is there any sort of multi tenant/delegated admin news and information other than this blog?

 

The reason I'm asking is that we look after MANY tenants and one of the pains for us is that despite MS saying we should be using a delegated admin account - there are lots of features that only work with a global admin within the tenant. Recently, I've seen more and more tasks (Such as converting to a shared mailbox) just working through delegation without any sort of change notification or news about this. - It would have been nice to know of such feature now works rather than just find out by accident!

 

(That being said, where as some features aren't supported and you get no option, there was always the option for shared mailbox conversion - it just never worked and errored out, so, I'm wondering if this was treated more as a ~10+ year old bug than a new feature!)

Copper Contributor

When can we expect the tenant switcher for Azure B2B? Just tried to invite myself from a customer tenant. It doesn't seem to work yet. This feature should solve a lot of security issues. One account (B2B) the rule all customer tenants.

Copper Contributor

So if i have 5 tenants then all will come under one roof and i can manage users and share license among each other tenant?

 

For example, if i have power bi license in Tenant A then i can allocate same to Tenant B?

Microsoft

@wroot  The M365 Admin Center see's 1/3rd of its traffic from partner and larger organizations that manage multiple tenants. This is an experience catered to all or them (Partner and enterprise) so they can do the things you would normally do in the Microsoft 365 admin center more efficiently across tenants. The M365 Lighthouse experience that is in development is a specialist workspace for Partners specifically. 

 

 

@Martin Day One of the way I usually explain the efficiency gains from this is thinking of the Service Health information. Lets say you manage 15 tenants, you would have to log into each of them independently and see which service incidents are effecting each tenant. Now you can get that information in one place. Happy to take feedback on the experience though, especially as you use the experience on if you still feel like you are making mistakes on which tenant you are managing, we actually went through a LOT of research to try to get that right. 

 

 

@wilhil  The tenant switching experience is something that was built to be reusable by other Admin Centers, as an example at Ignite Exchange Admin Center announced they are integrating it soon  (I am not 100% sure on the date). As for the limitation of the delegated admin accounts for partners, I cannot make an announcement, but I can confirm we are working to solve that. 

 

@Coen Verbree Azure B2B support is in the final stages of development and we hope to have support for that very soon, but I prefer to not promise a date till we validate the experience. Our target is before the end of the calendar year. 

Brass Contributor

Hi @Timothy Heeney 

 

Just to say, what I mentioned about delegated admin is just a comment that us partners really need more documentation or news updates! It isn't a complaint and it's great you are working on it - However, I'm finding things now work only by accident with seemingly no notifications or roadmap information etc.

 

It would be great if these can be blogged so we are aware!

Silver Contributor

I am still confused why All tenants and Lighthouse both have to exist. Here you say that with All tenants you can see all incidents in one pane. Lighthouse does similar showing all non patched machines across all tenants. I am probably missing some nuance here. maybe All tenants will have only some shared views, but not the ones that Lighthouse will have. Or maybe Lighthouse is only for partners that have partner access only. Although this still feels like overlapping function.

Copper Contributor

@wilhil Microsoft is working on pushing out more news to Partners. I've seen a preview and talked to them about it.

Copper Contributor

We manage a lot of tenants since 6 Years in Multi Account Containers in the browser.
That are goooooood news. We need this feature.

Copper Contributor

Thank you for this article. From a security perspective, is it better to have one partner admin account that manages multiple tenants or is it better to have one separate admin account for each tenant? or have both? I am curious to see if Microsoft has any research and/or recommendation on this. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts on this.

Silver Contributor

Will this be available in GCC?

Brass Contributor

@Scott Schnoll is there an ability to manage group permissions? We are an MSP that would love this new feature, however, would only work if we were to be able to manage our technicians permissions level by user/group.  We want to make sure not everyone in our organization has ALL-TENANT global administrator access to all of our clients - rather we want to be able to give access to groups/users for select customers.  Is this possible?

 

Also, is this different from the Partner Center? There is already a tenant switch in the partner center and I don't want to confuse the two.

Brass Contributor

@ChapmanBryan Exactly. This is a problem with the current partner center portal. I don't want all technicians to have partner-level access to all tenants.

Microsoft

Hello @ChapmanBryan  and @LowellP   I think there is two parts to your all admin being Global Admins issue. 

 

1. )There is a lack of role granularity for Partners since they cannot leverage all of the AAD roles, I mentioned this in a previous response. It would be premature to make an announcement,  but I can confirm we are working to solve this. It is an effort being undertaken by a variety of teams to collectively solve this problem. 

 

2. ) For the second piece around being able to manage a scope of objects within the tenant, to me that sounds like you are wanting admin unit like experiences, please correct me if I am mistaken. I am also responsible for RBAC management in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center as well, so I will investigate this to see when it would be feasible.

 

Thank you for the very constructive and actionable feedback! 

 

As for the comment around is this different than the partner center. While there is a small amount of overlap, this experience, as well as the features we are working on in the coming months, are all aimed at giving partner and multi-tenant administrators an efficient way to do all of the things they come to the Microsoft 365 admin center for. I encourage you to watch the embedded video in this article that discusses the roadmap. 

 

Brass Contributor

@Timothy Heeney Thanks for your quick response. Yes, for #2 above there are probably 2 parts as well:

  1. Ability to create role groups or units based on similar roles we see in M365. Global Admin is everything. Other roles can reset user passwords or maybe can't get into Security & Compliance sections.
  2. Ability to limit groups of technicians to a subset of customers. So here we could provide technicians access only to 40 of 50 customers in our partner management scope, as maybe those other 10 are only customers we sell (CSP) licenses to but don't want techs to have management capability of their tenant.
Copper Contributor

Is there any ETA on when we will see the All Tenants portion in Partner Center? We already see the Organization Switcher, but I haven't been able to locate the All Tenant feature anywhere nor have I seen anything about a date for release.

Microsoft

@CalTechCSEngineer  We are currently released to 10% and we are in the planning on expanding the exposure over the next couple of weeks to 50%.

 

Copper Contributor

@Timothy Heeney Ahh thank you! Is there anyway to put ourselves up the list and be in that 50%? I'm in the middle of evaluating some third party products that do this same thing and my timeline on getting one in place is within the next two months. If All Tenants isn't going to be out and have RBAC so we can limit users to certain customers or certain levels of admin instead of global admin or nothing then I'll just keep moving on with the third party evaluations. I'm definitely pleased to see Microsoft developing in this direction, just have to temper that against our timelines as well. 

Brass Contributor

@LowellP 

This is exactly what we're looking for!

Copper Contributor

What are the requirements to display the different tenants in Organization Switcher? 

Copper Contributor

@ChrisScAg I believe you have to be a CSP partner. It shows up as a stacked left right arrow to the right of a delegated tenant's name when you are in their Microsoft 365 Admin Center and you can click it and then you'll see all the customers in your Partner Center listed out and you just click and it switches you to their Admin Center.

Copper Contributor

@CalTechCSEngineer Yes you are right but sry, I should have been more precise with my question it was my fault.
We are CSP partners. Some of our consultants already have the function and see the 2 arrows.
But not me. This makes me suspect that the problem is with my user. The question therefore rather:
Do I need a more precise authorization?
How does my user have to be set up in the client so that this can work?
Do I need to set up certain policies?

Does our Microsoft Partner ID have to be deposited with the customer?

Copper Contributor

@ChrisScAg I didn't have to do anything special at all. Is your user listed as an Admin agent type for Partner Center?

Steel Contributor

What is the status of "All tenants" rollout? I do see the tenant switcher but not the "All tenants" to get an overview of all tenants.

Copper Contributor

3/12/2021 - All Tenants is still not an option - We do have the Tenant Switcher - its been 3 months??  Do we need to enable this somehow??

Microsoft

The all tenants experience just move from 25% to 50% exposure for all partner. We have been rolling it out slowly to date but we expect the rollout to continue to accelerate over the next month or two. 

Copper Contributor

Any update when the tenant switcher or all tenants experience will support B2B admins?

Copper Contributor

Hi @Timothy Heeney - Any updates on the Organization Switcher or All Tenants List rollout?  We are B2B admins with decentralized IT and separate tenants for each subsidiary and this would greatly help us.

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