Office 365 - New Groups Function

[BKGarry]

Hello All,

 

This one has snuck up on myself, Delivering the first chapter of Groups in Office 365 - Office Blogs

 

This seems to be a tool with great potential but the students have been in and started creating lots of silly groups at the moment, I can't seem to be able to stop them creating them at the moment, and even though I am logged in as a Office 365 admin, I do not seem to be able to delete them.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to achieve this?

 

Kind regards

[Steve21]

There's the command -GroupCreationEnabled $false isn't there if you want it scripted? But thought you could do it via default role policies?

 

Steve

[zag]

I've disabled this functionality with powershell. We had the same problems.

 

There is another thread on here somewhere with instructions, try a search

[BKGarry]

Is that the same as removing the tick for?

 

MyDistributionGroups

This role enables individual users to create, modify and view distribution groups and modify, view, remove, and add members to distribution groups they own.

 

As I have already done that and users can still make the groups :-(

[zag]

No, you need to use powershell.

[JRowley]

We used the powershell command to modify the students mailbox policy, so they are unable to create groups. Worth mentioning that they can still fill out all the information to create a group but when they hit create it throws an error, not exactly the neatest approach but it gets the job done.

[BKGarry]

powershell it is then,

 

time to get it all working on this PC, I cant remember what steps I had to do before, I know I need azure powershell, time for some fun :-)

[synaesthesia]

Ooh, cheers for the heads up. Forgot about those, we've just removed half a dozen random groups

 

set-OwaMailboxPolicy -GroupCreationEnabled $false -Identity OwaMailboxPolicy-Default

[JRowley]

powershell it is then,

 

time to get it all working on this PC, I cant remember what steps I had to do before, I know I need azure powershell, time for some fun :-)

 

It's very simple actually, here is the technet article for it. You can just use regular powershell.

 

Connect to Exchange Online using remote PowerShell: Exchange Online Help

[BKGarry]

I really need to learn powershell, I can see a big youtube session coming up on that.

@synaesthesia will that set it for all users? as it didn't quite work for me :-(

[synaesthesia]

That'll set it on the default policy, you'll need to tweak that if you've renamed your policies or have different ones for certain groups of users

[BKGarry]

Thank you, don't suppose you know a way of getting it to display a list of the current policy names?

[synaesthesia]

Not via powershell no, I can't get my aging head around that Only via the GUI (admin, exchange, permissions, owa policies)

[JRowley]

The current mailbox policies are those listed under:

 

Exchange Admin (on O365) -> Outlook Web App policies

[BKGarry]

bingo

 

Thank you @JRowley and @synaesthesia your help has been invaluable

[JRowley]

Yeah pretty painless really, I'm sure Microsoft will probably expand on the admin side of groups at some point in the future, there are a few issues with them as it stands, this one is obviously a bit of a nightmare for Schools, but I would expect also in business. Plus if you accidentally delete a group everything is gone forever, no restore features or recycle bin support currently. I would like to see a sharepoint site added to them too in future. They look very useful for departments though so we are going to trial them with our IT Department.