Intro
A few weeks ago a request came through to create a group that would have full access to all OneDrive for Business accounts in our Office 365 Tenant. I’m am patently against blanket access to things, even for administrators. It turns out the goal was to enable our Service Desk staff to manage user’s OneDrive’s as we ramp up our adoption rate through various “to the cloud” projects in the works.
We have a very small team who have admin rights to our SharePoint Online and we are wary of granting frontline technicians admin rights to it as it is a complex beast and there is sensitive data to consider. Currently, all requests to access another user’s OneDrive requires an escalation to that small team. This creates a constraint that isn’t much of a problem today, but will become one as our adoption rate grows.
I identified two user stories we needed to support:
- IT Technicians needing temporary access to a user’s OneDrive to assist them with various tasks
- Users needing to access the OneDrive of another user permanently (e.g. a manager needing access to the OneDrive of an employee on Extended leave)
We already have automation built into our leaver process which grants managers access to their leaver subordinate’s OneDrive for 30 days. Unfortunately, that functionality is tightly coupled with the leaver process so it can’t really be used for these two user stories.
I am a big fan of SharePoint lists. They make it really easy to make a web based form and tracking mechanism that can support RBAC. I’m also real big on PowerShell automation. I have quite a bit of automation involving both in production. One thing I don’t like is that most of this automation is on a scheduled basis and not a trigger basis. I noticed that SharePoint Online now has triggers for Microsoft Flow and that Microsoft Flow added the ability to run Azure Automation Runbooks. So that’s where I decided to go.
This blog will cover the temporary admin access solution. It’s intended to be more of an overview and not a deep dive or tutorial. This is a PowerShell blog, but most of this post will be taken up by Flow as it is the glue of the solution. However, I won’t go into great detail of Flow either.
