SharePoint Administrator Role: What It Does and How to Assign It

Someone on your team needs to create sites, fix sharing, and add site owners, but handing them Global Administrator feels like giving away the master key. There’s a role built for exactly this job.

In this tutorial, we’ll explain what the SharePoint administrator role can and can’t do, how it compares to Global Administrator, site admins, and site owners, and how to assign it in the Microsoft 365 admin center, the Microsoft Entra admin center, or PowerShell.

We’ll finish with the mistakes we see most and a short look at the SharePoint administrator job title.

Quick answer: The SharePoint Administrator is a Microsoft 365 admin role that opens the SharePoint admin center and lets the holder create and delete sites, manage organization-wide sharing, add site admins, set storage limits, and manage Microsoft 365 groups. To assign it, go to Roles > Role assignments in the Microsoft 365 admin center, select SharePoint Administrator, open Assigned, choose Add users, pick the person, and select Add.

What You Need Before You Start

• An account that can assign roles: Global Administrator or Privileged Role Administrator.
• The person’s user account in your Microsoft 365 tenant. We use our test user, Miller.
• For PowerShell only: the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module, or PnP PowerShell with your own Entra app registration.
• For time-limited assignments: Microsoft Entra ID P2 with Privileged Identity Management (PIM).

If you’re new to the platform itself, our overview of what SharePoint Online is explains how sites, libraries, and groups fit together before you hand out admin rights.

Step 1: Understand What the SharePoint Administrator Can Do

In the Microsoft 365 admin center, open Roles > Role assignments and stay on the Microsoft Entra ID tab. SharePoint Administrator sits in the Collaboration category, described as full access to SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 groups, service requests, and service health.

Select the role name to open its panel. The General tab says to assign it to users who need to manage all admin features in SharePoint Online, add and manage Microsoft 365 groups, open service requests, and monitor service health.

The Permissions tab goes deeper. It includes creating and deleting all resources in SharePoint, reading and configuring service health, and creating support tickets in both the Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Entra admin centers.

In daily work, that means the admin can create sites, delete sites, change organization-level sharing, add or remove site admins, and manage site storage limits. Microsoft also notes the role can manage Microsoft 365 groups, including restoring deleted groups and changing group owners.

Step 2: Assign the Role in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center

On the role panel, open the Assigned tab. It lists current admins with their last sign-in and scope (Organization), and it has two buttons: Add users and Add groups.

Select Add users, type the person’s display name or username, and select them in the results. The panel warns that you can only assign 20 users at a time. With Miller checked, the button reads Add (1); select Add to finish. We stopped at this point in our tenant, so Miller doesn’t hold the role.

You can also start from the user instead: Users > Active users, select the person, choose Manage roles, check the role, and select Save changes. Either way, Microsoft says access to the SharePoint admin center can take about an hour to appear.

Step 3: Assign It From Microsoft Entra or PowerShell

In the Microsoft Entra admin center, sign in as at least a Privileged Role Administrator and go to Identity > Roles & admins. Select the role name itself (not its check box), choose Add assignments, pick the users or groups, and select Add. With PIM, the same screen lets you make the assignment eligible or time-bound.

For scripts, Microsoft documents Microsoft Graph PowerShell. We haven’t run this one, so here it is as Learn shows it, using the role’s built-in template ID. If you haven’t set up PowerShell for Microsoft 365 yet, start with connecting to SharePoint Online with PowerShell.

Install-Module Microsoft.Graph -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "RoleManagement.ReadWrite.Directory"

# The user who gets the role
$user = Get-MgUser -Filter "displayName eq 'Miller'"

# SharePoint Administrator built-in role (template ID from Microsoft Learn)
$roleId = "f28a1f50-f6e7-4571-818b-6a12f2af6b6c"

New-MgRoleManagementDirectoryRoleAssignment `
   -DirectoryScopeId "/" -PrincipalId $user.Id `
   -RoleDefinitionId $roleId

One naming quirk: in Graph, the role can appear as SharePoint Service Administrator, so filtering by the ID is safer than filtering by display name.

Step 4: Open the SharePoint Admin Center and Start Working

Once the role is active, the person opens the SharePoint admin center from the Microsoft 365 admin center or directly at https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com. Sites > Active sites is where most work happens. To change a site’s admins, select the site, choose Membership, and save; our guide to the SharePoint site owner covers what owners can then do.

The role also unlocks tenant-level PowerShell. We connected PnP PowerShell to the admin URL and ran two read-only cmdlets that a normal site owner can’t run:

$adminUrl = "https://spguides-admin.sharepoint.com"
$clientId = "<your-app-client-id>"   # your own Entra app's client ID
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $adminUrl -ClientId $clientId -DeviceLogin -PersistLogin

# Tenant-wide view that only SharePoint admins get
Get-PnPTenantSite -Filter "Url -like 'SPGuides'" | Format-Table Title, Template, StorageUsageCurrent

Get-PnPTenant | Format-List SharingCapability, OneDriveStorageQuota

It listed our SPGuides sites with their template and storage used, such as SPGuides on GROUP#0 using 112 MB. The tenant reported ExternalUserAndGuestSharing, which allows both email sharing with guests and Anyone links, and a default OneDrive quota of 10240 MB (10 GB). For the full tenant inventory, see how to get all SharePoint Online sites with PnP PowerShell.

SharePoint Administrator vs Global Administrator vs Site Admin vs Site Owner

These four get mixed up all the time. Site-level roles are covered in depth in our SharePoint permissions best practices; this table is the quick version.

Role	Scope	SharePoint admin center	Typical use
Global Administrator	Every Microsoft 365 service and Entra ID	Yes	Emergencies only (Microsoft’s advice)
SharePoint Administrator	All of SharePoint, OneDrive settings, Microsoft 365 groups	Yes	Day-to-day SharePoint admin work
Site admin (site collection admin)	One site and its subsites	No	Full Control plus recycle bin, search, site features
Site owner	One site	No	Manage members, lists, pages, and settings

A Global Administrator already has every SharePoint Administrator permission. Site admins don’t need any Microsoft 365 admin role, and for group-connected sites the group owners become site admins automatically.

Does the SharePoint Administrator Have Access to Every Site?

Not automatically. Microsoft says SharePoint and Global Administrators don’t get automatic access to every site or OneDrive, but they can grant themselves access to any of them. That’s why we check membership first, the same way you’d check site permissions in SharePoint Online, and add ourselves only when a task needs it.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Giving Global Administrator instead. Microsoft recommends the role with the fewest permissions. If the job is sites and sharing, SharePoint Administrator is enough.
• Expecting instant access. Admin center access can take about an hour after you assign or remove the role.
• Connecting PowerShell to a site URL. Tenant cmdlets need the -admin URL, otherwise you hit errors like current site is not a tenant administration site.
• Scoping the role to an administrative unit. A SharePoint Administrator scoped that way manages only that unit’s Microsoft 365 groups and can’t use the SharePoint admin center.
• Using the role list’s search box. In our test it blanked the Role assignments page; scrolling to the role worked fine.

SharePoint Administrator as a Job Title

Many searches for this term are about the job, not the role. A SharePoint administrator keeps an organization’s sites running: creating sites, managing permissions and external sharing, handling storage, supporting users, and planning migrations. The job usually comes with the SharePoint Administrator role.

Useful skills include site and permission design, Microsoft 365 groups and Teams basics, PowerShell, and governance. If you’re preparing for an interview, our SharePoint interview questions cover the admin topics hiring managers ask about.

Next Steps

After assigning the role, the first real task is usually a new site. Our walkthrough to create a site in SharePoint Online using PnP PowerShell is a good next step, and the SharePoint tutorials hub has the rest.

We’d keep these admin guides close while you set up the new role:

• How to Delete a SharePoint Online Site Using PowerShell (PnP and SPO)
• Communication Site vs Team Site in SharePoint: Differences and When to Use Each
• SharePoint Online App Catalog: Tenant and Site Collection App Catalogs
• SharePoint Access Requests: How to Set Up, Approve and Troubleshoot Them

Frequently Asked Questions