Need to find who organization admin is

[jgrover]

I had a user trying to set up a free Teams account in order to join a meeting hosted by one of our partners. He was unable to do so, getting an error that his email address hasn't been added to our organization's directory.

The problem here is that we've never set up anything with Teams, or anything online that I'm aware of. We don't have Office 365 or hosted Exchange, everything we have is on-premises. 

The only people that would have set something up like this is myself (network admin) or my supervisor (VP of Technology) and neither of us have done it. How can I find out who the "admin" of this organization is so I can get this sorted out? I was thinking of evaluating Teams anyway as we're due to renew our Microsoft licensing and if it's a valuable tool I was going to look into options that include that in our pricing.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @jgrover ,

Either someone in your company has registered the domain or someone outside of your company may have. Either way contact details here of who to phone : -

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/Office365/Admin/contact-support-for-business-products?view=o365-wor...

Click the "Phone" tab - its hard to see. 

As someone has registered the domain you won't be able to join teams with emails from your domain unless you take control of this domain and purchase some licenses.  You can create a free Teams org if you happen to have another domain users can use :-

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/sign-up-for-teams-free-70aaf044-b872-4c32-ac47-362ab29ebbb1 

[#3]

Thanks @Andrew Hodges. I was able to open a support case with Microsoft on the issue. It appears that at some point a user signed up for a trial of some software and used their work email to do so. This created an "unmanaged tenant" in their system for our domain. They're sending me the instructions to do an admin takeover of the tenant which should get me squared away.

[#4]

Yup happened with my company too. Usually powerbi is the culprit. Anyway just to note you shouldn’t have to log in to join meetings. Usually you can bypass that and select “join via web client” and just type a name in when using chrome or edge browsers. No client and login required unless they invite as a guest and don’t allow external users which usually isn’t the case.

[#5]

@jgrover Could you share those instructions please - I have the same issue

[#6]

@k1s2021 

This is from the email I received from Microsoft Support:

In order to complete the process, you will need access to two different things:

1. An email address for the domain you're trying to take control of where you can send and receive emails.

2. Access to the DNS records associated with the domain.

To become an Admin:

1. First, go to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us and towards the bottom click the Try Free button under Share with Power BI Pro.
2. Sign up using your email address @the domain you wish to take over.
3. Once you sign up for Power BI, sign in at https://portal.office.com using the same credentials.
4. After logging into the portal, click on the app picker square in the upper-left hand corner and select the Admin icon app. If the Admin icon is not displayed right away, click the View all my apps icon and see if it's there. If it still doesn't show up then there's already an admin for the tenant and you need to find out who that is or contact Microsoft Support to find another way to do this. Power BI support was able to confirm that my tenant had no global admins, so we knew this would work.
5. After selecting the Admin icon you should have the Become an Administrator option. 
6. Choose that option to start the process. It will give you the information you need in order to create a specific TXT record in the DNS for this domain. After creating that record and clicking the Verify button in this wizard your account should be elevated to a Global Admin for the tenant.

Per the email, the Power BI admin takeover instructions are also found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Become-the-admin-and-purchase-Office-365-for-your-organizat...

I don't know if these steps are still accurate since I did this a couple of years ago, so it's possible some steps changed. Hopefully it helps you out, though.

[#7]

@Joe_Grover 

Thanks for instructions, but I don't have powerbi account associated with that address. (I'm trying to set up MS Teams)

[#8]

@k1s2021 I didn't have a PowerBI account, either. I used those settings to sign up for a free trial which gave me a PowerBI account using an address in our unmanaged tenant. Once I had this account I could go through the rest of the steps to make that account an admin in the tenant by proving ownership of the domain via DNS records.

[#9]

@Joe_Grover 

Thanks Joe, that did the trick.  (What a palaver!)

[#10]

Thank you @Joe_Grover. It worked just great.