News

Microsoft Teams Gets Admin Roles

• By Kurt Mackie
• 11/26/2018

Microsoft has added support for four different IT administrator roles to its Teams collaboration service.

Announced last week, the four roles that can be assigned for managing Teams are Service Administrator, Communication Administrator, Communications Support Engineering and Communications Support Specialist.

These roles get assigned using the "Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Admin Center," a single portal for managing those two applications, which Microsoft rolled out in March. It's also possible to the assign the IT roles using PowerShell.

The new Service Administrator role appears to have the broadest capabilities. It gives IT pros the ability to manage the Teams service at the organizational and group levels, as well as the ability to create Office 365 groups. IT pros having this role can set up meeting policies and conference bridges. They can manage calling and messaging policies. User profiles can be viewed, and IT pros have the ability to "troubleshoot user call quality problems," according to a Microsoft document description.

The Communications Administrator can manage meeting and calling policies. They can handle phone number assignments and troubleshoot call quality issues.

The Communications Support Engineering role is constrained to call troubleshooting using the Call Analytics dashboard within the Teams and Skype for Business Admin Center. IT pros having this role can view the "full call record information."

The Communications Support Specialist also can troubleshoot calls using the Call Analytics dashboard, but it's a more "basic" role. IT pros "can only view user information for the specific user being searched for," Microsoft's document explained.

In conjunction with the four new roles, Microsoft is touting the use of "37 Graph APIs," which can be leveraged to automatically provision teams and groups, and set expiration policies for them. However, it's a fairly involved programming task to set up such automation, based on this Microsoft demo.

The Graph APIs, which provide access to underlying Office 365 data, also can be leveraged to install applications within a team and make the apps accessible using tabs. The APIs also are being used by Microsoft's partners to make it easier to access apps within Teams.