Let's start by doing an introduction to
SharePoint Online administration. First of
all, what are the responsibilities of a
SharePoint Online administrator? At a high
level, the SharePoint Online administrator
is responsible for all of the aspects of
the SharePoint Online service including
maintenance and configuration on sites,
user profiles, taxonomies, and
integrations. The SharePoint Online
administrator is also responsible about
the user adoption and change management in
SharePoint Online. With the cloud and
changes coming in weekly, the SharePoint
Online administrator must make sure that
those are communicated to users. The
SharePoint Online admin is also
responsible for the governance around the
SharePoint Online service, so making sure
there is no sprawl of sites, that everyone
uses SharePoint as the company intends
users to do, and finally, security and
external sharing. Since SharePoint is the
file storage solution in Office 365, there
can be a lot of company‑sensitive
information in there, and a SharePoint
admin needs to make sure that all of the
security aspects are in place for that
information to stay secure. It's also
important to remember that, like I said
before, SharePoint Online is the file
storage solution for other Office 365
services, so you'll probably often have to
interact with the Teams and Yammer
administrators, for example, as files from
those applications are stored in
SharePoint on the back end. Usually, but
not always the case, the SharePoint Online
administrator is also the one responsible
for OneDrive for Business, especially
because historically, OneDrive for
Business has always been a part of
SharePoint. Even if they're separate
nowadays, separate admin centers and
everything, usually a person manages both
of those. So what are the tools that we
will use to administer SharePoint Online?
At a high level, we have the SharePoint
Online admin center, as well as
PowerShell. It's really important for you
to know that it's not one or the other.
It's really both of them together. And as
a SharePoint Online administrator, there
are some things that can only be done in
the admin center, while there are certain
things that can only be done via
PowerShell, and we'll go deeper into both
of those in this module. As for the
requirements, the minimum role that you
need is the SharePoint admin role in
Office 365, or you can, of course, be a
global admin, but SharePoint admin would
be the minimum. When you assign somebody
the SharePoint admin role, you might also
want to assign them the service
administrator role. This way, they can see
the important information in the Microsoft
365 admin center, such as the health of
SharePoint Online, message center, and release notifications.