Office 365 Groups

Lots happens in a month within Office 365. I can’t possibly write an article about every change in SharePoint, Teams, Exchange, etc. released by Microsoft,, so sometimes I need to publish a catch-up (or catch-up) post. Here are ten things that I think are interesting enough for you to know about.

The Office 365 Audit Log holds lots of interesting information about how people share information. In this article, we explore how to use the audit log records to discover the document sharing habits of users, including the documents shared with guest users and people outside the tenant.

Many Office 365 Groups and Teams have external guest members.Part 2 of our series about external access to documents in Office 365 explains how to use PowerShell to query groups about external guests so that we understand where the guests come from and what groups and teams they can access.

It’s a good idea to understand whether any external people have access to documents in your Office 365 tenant. There’s no option on the Office 365 or SharePoint Online consoles to tell you what access external users enjoy to SharePoint sites, so we must use some PowerShell to interrogate SharePoint and see what that reveals.

Microsoft Teams now shows team owners when their team is going to expire – that if, if you use the Office 365 Groups expiration policy. But tenant administrators don’t have a report showing them when groups expire, so we wrote one in PowerShell for you to use (and improve).

Anyone running an Office 365 tenant knows that it’s hard to keep up with everything that changes. Imagine what it must be like to write about Office 365! To clear my list of things that I want to mention but haven’t had the chance to, here’s some short snippets that you might or might not have heard about.

Office 365 makes it easy to collaborate with external users through Office 365 Groups and Teams, both of which use Azure B2B Collaboration. In fact, collaboration is so easy that users might be carried away and share with all and sundry, including your competitors. Which is why it’s nice to have a policy to control sharing with certain domains that works for applications like Groups, Teams, and Planner.

Microsoft is switching the default access type for Office 365 Groups to be private. It’s a change that you can easily reverse, if you want it groups to be public. The change will be effective for Outlook endpoints first, meaning OWA, Outlook desktops, and the Outlook mobile apps. Later, the other Office 365 apps that create Office 365 Groups might fall into line. Or not, as the case might be.

Teams now hides the Office 365 Groups that it creates from Exchange clients (Outlook, OWA, and the mobile apps). That’s as it should be for groups created for new teams. If you want to hide groups created for older teams, you can run the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet, but that soon becomes boring when you might have hundreds of groups to process. PowerShell to the rescue once again.

Since Office 365 appeared in 2011, Microsoft’s collaboration story has varied according to whatever technology is available. Originally based on Exchange and SharePoint, it’s gone through Yammer, Office 365 Groups, and now Teams. You’d be forgiven for being confused by the frequent changes in the strategy du jour. And now we have inner and outer loops to consider, at least according to Microsoft’s favorite collaboration slide. Here’s my take.