Parent Office 365 tenant with sub-tenants

Question

Hi,

We find ourselves in a situation where our parent company has moved our two company tenants into their own tenant space. The challenges we are currently encountering revolve around the loss of administrative control within the Office 365 administration console. This arises from the fact that, due to multiple tenants being housed under our parent company's tenant space, many administrative rights were revoked. As a result, we no longer have access to the user-friendly Office 365 admin center.

Our current consideration involves transitioning to Teams calling. However, when exploring administration rights, we were informed that our team would not possess the ability to administer any aspects of Teams calling.

My inquiry pertains to Microsoft's approach to multi-tenant setups. Is there a method to establish a structure where each subsidiary company within the parent tenant can independently manage their own Office 365 components through the admin center, without the risk of accessing other subsidiaries' tenant spaces? I am uncertain why achieving such autonomy within Microsoft's framework seems unattainable. If it is indeed possible, I kindly request a clear explanation of the steps required to approach our parent company and facilitate the request for IT management teams in other subsidiaries to independently oversee their respective tenant spaces, without the concern of inadvertently accessing other subsidiaries' tenant spaces through the administration console.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a proper tag to place this is.

Regards,

Brian

Answer 1

Microsoft's approach is via the so-called administrative units, which allow you to delegate permissions over a subset of the users (or objects, in general). However, not every admin functionality across M365 currently supports AUs, and in the case of Teams it's mostly limited to devices.

In your scenario, you might be better of using a third-party "portal replacement" type of tool.