Outlook 365 - Global Address List

[PICNIC]

We would like to give 6th form students email accounts, so we thought one solution would be Office 365 Edu and set this up. So we have 2000 student (incase we want to give all students emails which is a possibility in the future) and 300 Staff licences on the free Plan 2 for Faculty and Plan 2 for Students, excellent so far. We synced it with AD and activated one student account to test.

All works well except that the student account can see the Global Address List and we cant have little Jonny telling the head what he thinks by email whenever he feels the need! Is there any way of blocking the GAL?

Under assign licences, we only ticked the 'Exchange Online Plan 1' option. They cannot see the GAL in the options on the page, but it is fully accessible if they click 'To' on an email.

Thanks

[andyrite]

You could add a delivery restriction so that student groups can't email staff.

[PICNIC]

You could add a delivery restriction so that student groups can't email staff.

Thanks, that might help, but they can still see the email addresses so nothing to stop them copying it and sending an email from another email provider.

[jamesbmarshall]

It is possible to hide entries from the GAL, but you can't stop users from viewing it (even if it is empty).

Hiding entries from the GAL in an individual school is almost pointless if the exercise is to stop kids from emailing each other or members of staff as I can almost guarantee that your staff email addresses are going to be easy to guess and once you know one, you know them all!

If you want to shape communication you can, through the use of transport rules, restrict the flow of mail. There are overwhelming benefits to be realised by allowing students to communicate freely with staff; for example, the ability to communicate privately and honestly with teachers without fear of bullying from other pupils.

Surely it is better to deal with pupils who spam individually through the sanctions process of the school, rather than block (or at least try to) all communication at the detriment of those who'd use it properly?

Then again, I'm just the technical guy! If you want to hide the entries, you can. There's an attribute you can set in Exchange Online which is something like -hiddenfromaddresslistsenabled which you'd need to set to true for all users you want hidden.