Forum Discussion

Fredrik Gunne's avatar
Fredrik Gunne
Copper Contributor
Mar 03, 2020

How to delegate admin to employee without access to sensitive data

Hi,

 

We are a small ISV company with 12 employees, and we are on Office 365. We also use Azure DevOps for source repository and work-item tracking.

 

I am the CEO and co-owner. Me and the other co-owner are global admins.

Being a small company, I am also the "IT department", which includes things like:

* Adding and removing employees, configuring permissions, etc

* Creating external SharePoint sites for customer collaboration

* Adding and removing guest accounts (for customer collaboration)

* Etc

 

This has started to become a burden for me, and I would like to delegate at least some of the work to one of our employees. However, I don't want to make the person a global admin, since that would, at least in theory, give access to sensitive data (my email, HR documents with salaries, etc).

 

What are the recommended strategy to do this? I know there are more granular admin roles than global admin, but I don't see how this can help much. For instance, if I want to delegate the work to maintain our external sites for collaboration, I guess I could make my employee "SharePoint admin". But as soon as I do that, the employee (I guess) will get access to the SharePoint HR-site which contains the salary files, etc.

 

Any advice? 

5 Replies

  • You can grant him permissions on the Site collections in question only, either as primary/secondary SC admin.

    • binodmaharjan_2020's avatar
      binodmaharjan_2020
      Copper Contributor

      HI VasilMichev 

      Yes, you can provide them permission for a specific site only instead of Sharepoint Admin. External users will only be available to modify a given site as you delegate.

      • Fredrik Gunne's avatar
        Fredrik Gunne
        Copper Contributor

        binodmaharjan_2020 , VasilMichev : This would only help slightly. The tasks that this "semi-admin" would perform is much more than only maintaining security on a few site collections. Of the examples I mentioned, only the second task would be possible using your proposal:

         

        * Adding and removing employees, configuring permissions, etc

        * Creating external SharePoint sites for customer collaboration

        * Adding and removing guest accounts (for customer collaboration)

        * Etc

         

        I am more looking for a way to grant permissions to a person enough to do more or less everything except a few things, such as the managers' email, some document libraries/sites etc.

         

        This must be something that all companies of significant size must struggle with? I don't believe that the CEO of many companies handle all Office 365 management tasks - so how do they solve it?

Resources