Use security groups to manage users and groups

Article
10/20/2023

TFS 2018

To manage permissions and access, use security groups. You can use default or custom groups to set permissions. You can add users and groups to multiple groups. For instance, you add most developers to the Contributors group. When they join a team, they also join the team’s group.

For more information, see the following articles:

Users inherit permissions from the group(s) that they belong to. If a permission is set to Allow for one group and Deny for another group to which the user belongs, then their effective permission assignment is Deny. For more information, see About permissions/Inheritance.

How Azure DevOps uses security groups

Azure DevOps uses security groups for the following purposes:

Determine permissions allocated to a group or user
Determine access level allocated to a group or user
Filter work item queries based on membership within a group
Use @mention of a project-level group to send email notifications to members of that group
Send team notifications to members of a team group
Add a group to a role-based permission
Set object-level permissions to a security group

Note

Security groups belong to the collection level, even if they only access a specific project. Some groups may be hidden in the web portal depending on user permissions. However, you can discover the names of all groups in an organization using the REST APIs. For more information, see Add and manage security groups.

Prerequisites

To manage permissions or groups at the project level, you must be a member of the Project Administrators Group. If you created the project, you're automatically added as a member of this group.
To manage permissions or groups at the collection or instance level, you must be a member of the Project Collection Administrators Group. If you created the organization or collection, you're automatically added as a member of this group.

Create a custom security group

Create a project-level group when you want to manage permissions at the project- or object-level for a project. Create a collection-level group when you want to manage permissions at the collection level. For more information, see Change project-level permissions and Change project collection-level permissions.

Open the web portal and choose the project where you want to add users or groups. To choose another project, see Switch project, repository, team.
Choose the gear icon to open the administrative context.
Choose Security and under Groups, choose one of the following options:
- Readers: To add users who require read-only access to the project, choose.
- Contributors: To add users who contribute fully to this project or who have been granted Stakeholder access.
- Project Administrators: To add users who need to administrate the project. For more information, see Change project-level permissions.
Next, choose the Members tab.

Here we choose the Contributors group.

Tip

Managing users is much easier using groups, not individual users.

By default, the default team group and any other teams you add to the project, are included as members of the Contributors group. Add a new user as a member of a team instead, and the user automatically inherits Contributor permissions.
Choose Add to add a user or a user group.
Enter the name of the user account into the text box. You can enter several identities into the text box, separated by commas. The system automatically searches for matches.

Note

The first time you add a user or group to Azure DevOps, you can't browse to it or check the friendly name. After the identity has been added, you can just enter the friendly name.
(Optional) You can customize user permissions for other functionality within the project, such as areas and iterations or shared queries.

Note

Users with limited access, such as Stakeholders, can't access select features even if granted permissions to those features. For more information, see Permissions and access.

Add users or groups to a security group

As roles and responsibilities change, you might need to change the permission levels for individual members of a project. The easiest way to do that is to add the user or a group of users to either a default or custom security group. If roles change, you can then remove the user from a group.

Here we show how to add a user to the built-in Project Administrators group. The method is similar no matter what group you're adding. If your organization is connected to Microsoft Entra ID or Active Directory, then you can add security groups defined in those directories to Azure DevOps security groups. For more information, see Add Active Directory / Microsoft Entra users or groups to a built-in security group. If you need to add more than 10k users or groups to an Azure DevOps security group, we recommend adding an Azure Directory / Microsoft Entra group containing the users, instead of adding the users directly.

Open the Permissions page for either the project-level or organization-level as described in the previous section, Create a custom security group.
Choose the security group whose members you want to manage, then choose the Members tab, and then choose Add.

For example, here we choose the Project Administrators group, Members, and then Add.
Enter the name of the user account into the text box. You can enter several identities into the text box, separated by commas. The system automatically searches for matches. Choose the match(es) that meets your choice.

Note

Users with limited access, such as Stakeholders, can't access select features even if granted permissions to those features. For more information, see Permissions and access.
Choose Save changes. Choose the refresh icon to see the additions.

Change permissions for a user or group

Because permissions are defined at different levels, review the following articles to open the dialog for the permissions you want to change:

Remove users or groups from a security group

To remove a user from a group, choose Remove next to the user's name that you want to remove.

Manage group settings

You can change a group name, description, add a group image, or delete a group.

From the Project > Settings > Security or Organization > Settings > Security page, choose the group you want to manage
Choose from the Edit menu to either Edit profile or Delete.

For example, here we open the Edit profile for the Stakeholder Access group.

. . . and change the description. You can change the name of the group as well.
Choose Save to save your changes.

On-premises deployments

For on-premises deployments, see these other articles:

If your on-premises deployment is integrated with SQL Server Reports, you need to manage membership for those products separately from their websites. See Grant permissions to view or create SQL Server reports in TFS.

Next steps

Manage projects