Administrative Permissions

As you explore the articles in our help center, you will see mentions of four main types of administrative permissions:

1. Global Administrator
2. SharePoint Administrator
3. Site Collection Administrator
4. Farm Administrator

Global Administrator permissions are required to access your Office 365 Sharepoint admin center. Only Global Administrators can assign admin roles on Office 365. This is recommended on both the source and the destination site collections in order to take advantage of all migration options. For more on this, click here.

SharePoint Administrator permissions are required to manage document storage in the SharePoint admin center. SharePoint Administrators can assign Site Collection Administrator permissions and Term Store Administrator permissions . This is a separate permission than Global Administrator, as Global Administrators may have no access to a SharePoint site if they are not added to it, whereas a SharePoint Administrator will.

Site Collection Administrator permissions are required to connect to all Site Collections on your farm. This is recommended on both the source and the destination site collections in order to take advantage of all migration options. For more on this, click here. Remember that Site Owner and Site Collection administrator are two different roles. You can read more on the differences in this blog.

Farm Administrator permissions are recommended on both the source and destination Farm if you are migrating site collections on the web application. If you are using SharePoint 2003, you must also have Site Owned permissions at both the source and destination of your migration. For more on this, click here.

For a complete list of Office 365 admin roles, see here.

For a complete list of SharePoint admin roles, see here.