Planning Lync Online Administration

An important aspect of planning for Lync Online is determining how the cloud deployment will be administered. Much like an on-premise Lync deployment, Lync Online and Office 365 follow a role-based access control (RBAC) model, in which permissions and capabilities are defined by management roles. When an organization signs up for a Lync Online or Office 365 subscription, the individual who handles the sign-up process automatically becomes a global administrator, or top-level administrator for the cloud deployment. Additional administrators can then be added as needed to handle various aspects of the online tenant. There are a total of five administrator roles within Office 365, as shown in Table 28.3. Each user account that is added to the cloud organization is automatically assigned the user role, which has no administrative permissions. Individual user accounts can then be assigned to one of the administrative roles to delegate permissions to the online tenant.

Table 28.3. Lync Online/Office 365 Administrator Roles