SDS - Teams - Existing Groups

[FragglePete]

Morning all, bear with me here.....

 

We're using Teams like most at this present time, and it's going well with positive feedback from Staff. However, we're not using SDS just yet and Staff are manually creating Teams themselves and adding students from our mailgroups that we sync from SIMS using Burconix (BCX). We also use this to create our Users directly from SIMS and EmployeeID attribute in AD is populated with their MIS ID. As expected, we have just under 100 Teams created by Staff where naming convention is bit all over the place or named something silly where staff are just playing around with it.

 

I've long wanted BCX to do a bit more, but no plans to so maybe in the future get a solution like Salamander, Locker, etc to go a bit further, but in the meantime I've been looking at the Salamander SDS Utility. With a couple of powershell scripts and with the MIS ID in our Users AD accounts I can generate the .CSV files the SDS Utility needs which happily outputs all the necessary .CSVs ready to upload to Microsoft.

 

We use Azure AD Connect so User accounts and Class Groups (mail enabled) are sycn'd with Office365, so we have class groups such as 'Ar-7-B2', 'Sc-10-P4' which reflect the class names in SIMS and teachers use these groups to mail out stuff as required.

 

Now - help me out here. I can see in the SDS Upload bit of a new profile to facilitate existing users, and my understanding is that it'll add additional attributes along with new Office365 Groups which I assume will be just like I have already - so I'm worried as to what it will do here? Break things, not work or work it out itself?

 

I'm thinking I maybe best waiting until the end of the academic year, clear out all the current Teams from Office365 (ones that have been created by teachers manually), clear out all my current groups sync'd with BCX (I usually do these each year anyway and reproduce them come September) and get this SDS Profile up and running during the Summer. Less chance of breaking things.

 

Then, having Teachers being able to create and activate Teams based solely on groups created by SIMS/SDS. Will the Office365 groups created in SDS be mail enabled so won't have to do this bit BCX, just the user creation bit?

 

Sorry - long post - but just trying to understand things a bit better before taking this next step.

 

Regards

 

Pete

[psydii]

We have two entire sets of groups one 'legacy' sims->salamander->ad->AzureAD (classic DL/Security Groups) and the other SIMS->SDS>AzureAD (Teams) We used a prefix to differentiate between the two.

[FragglePete]

We have two entire sets of groups one 'legacy' sims->salamander->ad->AzureAD (classic DL/Security Groups) and the other SIMS->SDS>AzureAD (Teams) We used a prefix to differentiate between the two.

So, are both sets of groups mail enabled? I'm just worried have two sets of groups staff will get confused as to which to use - rather just have one set they use for everything.

 

Appreciate the response though.

 

Thanks

 

Pete

[DrCheese]

I was worried about the same (& have salamander managing the groups on AD & in SDS)

 

The SDS groups are mail enabled, but they appear like below

 

[email protected]

 

You can hide them from the GAL & they *don't* automatically appear under groups in Outlook.

 

They are Office365 *only* groups so won't appear on your local AD

The same class on AD already has a mail group on our local AD which appear as something like "[email protected]"

 

 

For Staff teams that get created, i.e Lets say you make a "Staff.Exams" Team, but you already have a "Staff.exams" AD group, again by default this would be created with an onmicrosoft domain that you hide from the GAL, so staff won't see it

But what you also need to do is turn on this feature on the back of the group in 365 - Any 365 group that's created within teams won't appear at the bottom of outlook, so if anyone does accidentally find that group in the email list or say.. schedules a meeting, they won't see it

 

 

Now long term you'd phase those AD groups out (Or at least un-mail enable them) and then change the team groups to be the @schooldomain groups - If that makes sense?

 

(Can you tell I've worked this out painfully over the past few weeks!)

[FragglePete]

I think that makes senses. So, if I do the SDS Upload now in a profile it's not going to fubar things too much?

 

Pete

[DrCheese]

Nope, won't cause a problem.

 

Microsoft changed it a few months ago so that teachers needed to activate a team before students used it (Before students could jump in and use it without teachers even knowing about it)

 

I believe they've also now changed it so that teachers have to create the team full stop from the data that you've uploaded, so they don't accidently activate it without knowing it

[chazzy2501]

I use salamander SDS but only to gather and store the CSVs just quit and don't upload through the tool. Then you can read the csv output and see if it is going to collide. I had to make sure that ours sims emails matched pupils actual emails as we use that as their username and that is how the sds matched the users.

[psydii]

As per

[psydii]

As per @DrCheese, except we don't hide them.

 

It doesn't matter which the teacher emails the kids still get them.

 

Next year we'll probably get salamander to make the AD ones security groups only, just to simplify things.

[FragglePete]

Ok..... here goes nothing!

 

Pete

[DrCheese]

As per @DrCheese, except we don't hide them.

 

It doesn't matter which the teacher emails the kids still get them.

Next year we'll probably get salamander to make the AD ones security groups only, just to simplify things.

 

Yes likewise - Just worried about the mass chaos switching the distro lists might cause right now

[FragglePete]

I'm taking the view that the existing Distro Lists will still work and so will current Teams, so let them carry on using those for now. If a teacher creates a new team, then it'll be one that's provided for them via SDS and the members it creates. Come Summer, I'll have a massive clear down of Teams and Distro groups ready for a fresh in September.

 

Watching its progress now, showing a few errors on the teachers.csv but I'm hoping that's down to staff listed in our SIMS that don't have accounts in AD (Governers, etc). Nail biting stuff!

 

Pete

[FragglePete]

Thanks all. I was getting a fair few errors, but have worked my way through each and resolved the various issues. First being that one of the teachers didn't have the MIS ID set in AD from SIMS. I also had 4 students that it claim it couldn't match - digging a bit deeper exposed cases of spelling mistakes of the surnames when the accounts were created and subsequently corrected and/or Surnames that had been changed for whatever reason.

 

The only errors I'm getting now are for members of Staff we have within SIMS but don't have AD accounts for as they could be invigilators, etc that just don't use the network. So, these can be ignored.

 

All seems to be ok now. So, lots of extra Groups added with 'Section_' prefixes added which have the Staff Members down as owners populated with all the right students.

 

I got a teacher to log in and I can see the extra option of 'Create a team using a group set by you or ' which then shows the list of classes as they appear in SIMS. It creates the Team and has the activate button all ready for them to invite students.

 

So - thanks all for your help. Now to play a bit more with Policies and stuff.

 

Pete

[FragglePete]

If anyone is interested, this is how I'm getting .csv files out from my AD to put into the SDS Utility.

 

Each line does a search on AD for accounts that have the EmployeeID attribute set along with -SearchBase to look to only look at a particular OU, labels up the columns and outputs the .CSV.

 

First line is for staff accounts, the second and third for Students which I have for the lower school and our Sixth Form. Using the Append feature, it just creates the one file ready for the Student Import.

 

It may not be pretty, but it only takes a few seconds to run and output the files which I can then process with the utility immediately.

 

Get-ADUser -LDAPFilter "(&(EmployeeID=*))" -SearchBase "OU of Staff Accounts" -Properties EmployeeID,samaccountname,mail | Select @{Name="ID";Expression={$_.EmployeeID}},@{Name="Username";Expression={$_.samaccountname}},@{Name="Email";Expression={$_.mail}} | Export-Csv -Path C:\Temp\salamander\input\outStaff.csv -NoTypeInformation

Get-ADUser -LDAPFilter "(&(EmployeeID=*))" -SearchBase "OU of Student Accounts" -Properties EmployeeID,samaccountname,mail | Select @{Name="ID";Expression={$_.EmployeeID}},@{Name="Username";Expression={$_.samaccountname}},@{Name="Email";Expression={$_.mail}} | Export-Csv -Path C:\Temp\salamander\input\outStudents.csv -NoTypeInformation

Get-ADUser -LDAPFilter "(&(EmployeeID=*))" -SearchBase "OU of Sixth Form Accounts" -Properties EmployeeID,samaccountname,mail | Select @{Name="ID";Expression={$_.EmployeeID}},@{Name="Username";Expression={$_.samaccountname}},@{Name="Email";Expression={$_.mail}} | Export-Csv -Path C:\Temp\salamander\input\outStudents.csv -NoTypeInformation -Append

 

Pete

[species3618]

Hi,

 

The O365 groups created by SDS will ususally be prefixed with Section_ as far as I remember, so the existing Distribution groups you have won't collide with the ones created by SDS.