The real power of the “Administrative units” feature is the ability to designate an admin user that will be able to perform various tasks against all users in the scope of a particular AU – and only those users! This is very important for large organizations in Office 365, as up until now we didn’t have any features that enabled admin role separation. So, why are AUs important? After all, simply grouping the objects in some logical unit doesn’t necessarily help to ease the administrative burden. As there are very few limitations in terms of who can be a member of an AU, you can get very creative with them – but we will talk more about this in the next section. For example, you could create an AU for: all the users in the Sales department, or all users working in the UK, or simply all users with a particular attribute. AUs allow you to “group” your users into logical units, which makes it easier to designate them as a whole. Simply put, Administrative units (we’re going to call these AUs from here on in) are a container for user objects, akin to Organizational Units on-premises.

The rollout was announced with an update to the corresponding Office 365 Roadmap item and the following Message Center post:Īs neither the Roadmap items, the Message center post, nor the linked “documentation” are very descriptive as to what exactly the feature does, and how to configure it, we thought it might be useful to dig into this feature a bit more, and publish some guidance on Administrative Units. As of two weeks ago, an update that incorporates the Administrative units feature into the Office 365 Admin center has started rolling out across the service.

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