With CRM Online, adding users and managing organizations is performed via the Office 365 Administrator Portal. This has some great advantages, as you can perform organization maintenance on all of your organizations from a central location.

This also means that managing CRM Online organization settings in Office 365 Admin Portal requires Global Administrator privileges.

But what do you do if no CRM users are Office 365 Global Administrators? If you work in a high security environment, there is a good chance that CRM administrators will not be given Office 365 Global Admin permissions, especially if other systems like Exchange Online or SharePoint Online are in use.

Without Global Admin permission, no CRM user will see notifications, alerts, be able to monitor the health of the service, or be able to schedule upgrades.

Suggestions:

• Designate a Global Administrator to work with the CRM team. When users have trouble accessing the system, they will need someone to call who can check the status of the service. When there is an upgrade to schedule, the CRM team will need to work with a Global Administrator to schedule the upgrade.
• Have at least one Global Administrator trained in the process or copying and refreshing sandbox organizations, so the dev/uat/qa environment can be refreshed occasionally.
• Create a Global Administrator user account, then set up a rule to forward all mail sent to that user’s mailbox to a distribution list that includes CRM admins. That way alerts that come up will get sent to the members of that group. It’s not perfect, because you won’t get every notice (such as licensing conflicts, which don’t generate emails), but it is better than nobody on the CRM team being notified.

Thanks to my friends at Palmetto Technology Group for advising me on this tip. If you need someone to help you manage the sometimes confusing world of Office 365, they really know their stuff.