Update Multiple Entra ID Accounts in a Single Action

It’s perhaps a natural assumption that administrative consoles like the Entra admin center perform actions against singular objects. However, that’s not the case because the Entra admin center now boasts an upgraded edit menu which supports operations against multiple user accounts (Figure 1). As indicated by the admin center, the update is currently in preview.

The older bulk operations menu has options for bulk create, bulk invite, and bulk delete.

No Notification from Entra

The disappointing thing is that Microsoft 365 administrators might struggle to discover interesting news like this because the Entra development group don’t post notifications to the Microsoft 365 message center. Hearing about changes might depend on fortuitously seeing a message in a social media feed or reading an article like this. It’s odd that Entra doesn’t take advantage of posting notifications in the Microsoft 365 message center because Microsoft 365 is a significant workload for Entra ID that generates large amounts of revenue through premium licenses.

The only documentation for bulk Entra ID updates that I can find refer to the bulk operations menu and says “Bulk operations in the Microsoft Entra admin portal could time out and fail on large tenants. This limitation is a known issue due to scaling limitations.”

The recommended workaround is to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. That’s certainly a good idea if you want to process large numbers of accounts. It takes a little while to master user account management with the Graph SDK, but once you understand the basic mechanism, everything clicks into place and scripting account management isn’t a challenge.

What You Can do to Update Multiple Entra ID Accounts

Using the options in the edit menu is easy. Select some accounts (which can be a mixture of member and guest accounts), and choose one of the supported actions to update multiple Entra ID accounts:

• Edit properties (Figure 2). Only certain properties can be edited.
• Add manager. Every account should have a manager
• Add sponsors. Account sponsorship is really intended for guest accounts. A flaw in the implementation means that the UI doesn’t reveal if the chosen accounts already have sponsors. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to cancel sponsor assignment if you decide not to select a sponsor. The perils of preview software…
• Add as members of a group.
• Add to administrative unit.
• Edit account status. This option changes the accountEnabled property for the selected accounts from Enabled to Disabled or vice versa.
• Revoke sessions with a forced sign-out. Affected user accounts must reauthenticate to reconnect.

As you might expect, any change made to a user account is captured in an individual audit record and is discoverable by searching the Entra ID audit log (Figure 3) or the unified audit log (after ingestion).

Update Multiple Entra ID Accounts is Goodness

The new edit menu option is an example of a change that’s surprising because it hasn’t appeared before now. Making changes to multiple accounts at one time is a great way to speed up administration. It avoids the need to use PowerShell to process one-off changes for small groups of users. However, I’d always use PowerShell for anything more complex because of the extra control it affords.

After all, the nice thing about PowerShell is that you get to choose how to implement functionality without waiting for Microsoft to add options to an admin center. Then again, good things come to those who wait…

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