Visual Studio Online (cloud based TFS): Creating Additional Administrators

We have all been bottle-necked when there is one administrator for Visual Studio Online and hence only one person who can manage source code control. While the VSOL administrator is on the beach in Florida there are no new projects created and no new users added to VSOL.

To create a second administrator:

1) The administrator should log in to VSOL (this blog's instance of VSOL is found at https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com).

https://<VSOL instance name>.visualstudio.com

2) The administrator should navigate to the screen which allows access to security including group and use management:

https://<VSOL instance name>.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_admin/_security

For this blog's instance of VSOL the link can be found at https://admiralgracehopper.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/_admin/_security.

4) From the security tab, select "Users" and click on the user to be assigned administrative permissions:

The current administrator is Keyser Soeze. User, Jan David Narkiewicz, will also be made an administrator. The screen shown demonstrates the individual permission associated with Jan David Narkiewicz. Instead of setting individual permissions it is simpler to assign the user to the appropriate group or groups.

5) From the previous screen select "Member of":

6) To associate the user with additional groups including making said user an administrator click on "Join group":

7) From the "JOIN A VISUAL STUDIO ONLINE GROUP" dialog click on "Browse":

8) The list of account types is listed. The type of administrator can be fine tuned such as checking only "Project Collection Administrators" or "Project Collection Build Administrators". After adding all groups the permissions for user, Jan David Narkiewicz includes every administrative level feature because such permissions are inherited from the groups associated with the user:

Note: individual permissions can be added by clicking on the "Not set" control next to the permission type and setting the value to "Allowed".