Add users or groups to a team or project

TFS 2017 | TFS 2015 | TFS 2013

You add users to a team or project so they can contribute to the team and project. For enterprise organizations with large user bases, we recommend you use Active Directory or Windows Group to manage users through security groups. However, to enable flexibility for all size organizations, the following operations are supported:

• Team and project administrators can add existing users to their team or project. Existing users are ones known to the project collection through Active Directory or Windows group.
• Adding users to a team or project automatically adds them to the Contributors group for the project. Members of the Contributors group have permissions to most features needed to contribute.
• By adding users to a team, you make team-specific tools aware of them, such as the team security group, Team Members widget, and sprint capacity planning tools.
• Once users have been added to a project or organization, you can browse for their display name or user name (email alias) from any people-picker tool.

You add projects to an organization or project collection and you add teams to projects. To learn more, see:

• Create a project
• Add team, go from one default team to others

Important

To view the content available for your platform, make sure that you select the correct version of this article from the version selector which is located above the table of contents. Feature support differs depending on the on-premises version of TFS you are using. .
To learn which on-premises version you are using, see What platform/version am I using?

Supported options for adding users

Team and project administrators can add existing users to their team or project. Existing users are ones that are known to a project collection through the Active Directory or Windows Group created for the server that hosts the on-premises Azure DevOps Server.

Administrator level

Interface

Supported tasks

Team administrators

Project Settings>Teams>Team>Members

Add existing users or groups to a team, or remove a member.

Project Administrators

Project Summary page, Invite

Add new or existing users. Send new users an invite. Optionally add users to one or more teams.

Project Administrators

Project Settings>Permissions>Groups>Group Members

Add existing users or groups to a security group. By adding to a team group, you effectively add them to the team. Optionally remove a user from a group.

Active Directory Administrators

Active Directory or Windows Group

Users you add to Active Directory or Windows Group connected to Azure DevOps are added as members of the Project Collection Valid Users group. They have access to all projects within a project collection. To learn more, see Set up groups for use in Azure DevOps on-premises.

Prerequisites

• If you don't have a project yet, create one
• To add users to or remove users from a team, you must be added as a team administrator, or be a member of one of the administrative groups.
• To add users to or remove users from a project,you must be a member of the Project Administrators group.
• To add users or manage users for a server, you must be a member of the Azure DevOps Administrators group.

If you're new to Azure DevOps, you may want to familiarize yourself with the information provided in these articles:

• Get started with permissions, access levels, and security groups
• About projects and scaling your organization
• Default permissions and access quick reference
• About teams and Azure Boards tools

Add users or groups to a team

Add existing users or security groups to a team from the Project settings> Teams page. From this interface you can view, add, or remove users and security groups to/from a team. To add a custom security group, see Add or remove users or groups, manage security groups.

Preview page

Choose the Current page tab for information on adding a user to a team. The New Teams Page preview feature is only available for Azure DevOps Services at this time.

Current page

1. From the project admin context, open the Overview page, and then choose the team you want to add team members to.

   

2. Choose the Add to add a user or a user group.

3. Enter the sign-in addresses or display name for each user you want to add. Add them one at a time or all at the same time. You can enter several identities into the text box, separated by commas.

   

   Tip

   You must enter user and group names one at a time. However, after entering a name, it is added to the list, and you can enter another name in the Identities text box before choosing to save your changes.

   You may need to choose the refresh icon to see your updates.

4. To add an account as a team administrator, choose Add located in the Team Profile page. For details, see Add a team administrator.

Remove users or groups from a team

From the team's Members page, you can remove members.

Preview page

Choose the Current page tab for information on adding a user to a team. The New Teams Page preview feature is only available for Azure DevOps Services at this time.

Current page

1. To remove members, return to this page, highlight the user name, and then choose Remove.

   

   Note

   To remove a team administrator as a team member, you must first remove them as an administrator.

Invite users from the Summary page

As a member of the Project Administrators group, you can add members to a project from the Summary page and optionally add them to one or more teams. To learn more about the Summary page, see Share your project vision, view project activity.

Note

For on-premises Azure DevOps, all email actions require an SMTP server to be configured.

1. Open the Project>Summary page, and choose the Add button.
   

2. For new users, enter their email address. For existing users, type their name until it resolves as a known name to the system. You can add several email addresses or account names by separating them with a semicolon (;).

   Choose the entry listed under Add users to complete the entry.

   If you're adding a user known by the organization or collection, type the name or email address and then choose the name that appears to complete the entry.

   

   

   Note

   Any valid email address is acceptable. When the user accepts the invitation and signs into Azure DevOps, they register their email address as a Microsoft account and choose a password.

3. Optionally, select the teams you want to add the user to and then choose Add to complete the invitation.

   When the user is unknown, you'll get a notification that an access level must be assigned. To complete the invitation, choose Add.

   Choose Add to complete the invitation.

   

   

   When adding a new user, the system assigns Stakeholder as the access level when all free five Basic access levels have been assigned. Active contributors to a project need to have Basic access as a minimum. A Project Collection Administrator can change the access level from the Organization Settings>Users page.

   Note

   Users that have limited access, such as Stakeholders, won't be able to access select features even if granted permissions to those features. To learn more, see Permissions and access.

4. (Optional) A message will briefly display on the screen to indicate success or failure. Choose Details to open the notification and review details.

   

   

   A success message indicates the status of adding the user to the system.

   A failure message indicates why the addition of the user failed.

   ":::

   

5. New users receive an email inviting them to sign in to the project. Existing users don't receive any formal notification.

Add users or groups to a project

As a member of the Project Administrators group, you can add users or groups to a project from the Project settings> Permissions page by adding them to a security group. To add a custom security group, see Add or remove users or groups, manage security groups.

Preview page

Choose the Current page tab for information on adding a user to a project. The Project Permissions Settings Page preview feature is only available for Azure DevOps Services at this time.

Current page

1. Open the web portal and choose the project where you want to add users or groups. To choose another project, see Switch project, repository, team.

2. Choose the gear icon to open the administrative context.

   

3. Choose Security and under Groups, choose one of the following options:

   • Readers: To add users who require read-only access to the project, choose.
   • Contributors: To add users who contribute fully to this project or who have been granted Stakeholder access.
   • Project Administrators: To add users who need to administrate the project. To learn more, see Change project-level permissions.

4. Next, choose the Members tab.

   Here we choose the Contributors group.

   

   Tip

   Managing users is much easier using groups, not individual users.

   By default, the default team group and any other teams you add to the project, are included as members of the Contributors group. Add a new user as a member of a team instead, and the user automatically inherits Contributor permissions.

5. Choose Add to add a user or a user group.

6. Enter the name of the user account into the text box. You can enter several identities into the text box, separated by commas. The system automatically searches for matches.

   

   Note

   The first time you add a user or group to Azure DevOps, you can't browse to it or check the friendly name. After the identity has been added, you can just enter the friendly name.

7. (Optional) You can customize user permissions for other functionality within the project, such as areas and iterations or shared queries.

   Note

   Users that have limited access, such as Stakeholders, won't be able to access select features even if granted permissions to those features. To learn more, see Permissions and access.

Add users or groups to an access level

For on-premises deployments, you may need to set the access level for a user or group, particularly if those groups don't belong to the default access level. To learn more, see Change access levels.

Add users or groups to SharePoint or SQL Server Reports

If your on-premises deployment is integrated with a SharePoint product or SQL Server Reports, you need to manage membership for those products separately from their websites.

• Set SharePoint site permissions
• Grant permissions to view or create SQL Server reports in Azure DevOps Server

Next steps

Manage your project

Related articles

• Resources granted to project members
• Grant or restrict access using permissions.