Office 365 Groups

Owners of Office 365 Groups can delete groups if they want. Some don’t like this as it means that SharePoint site collections, teams, and plans are removed. The simple membership model used by Office 365 Groups is the cause, and while you cannot stop owners deleting their groups, you can take action to detect and recover deleted groups if necessary.

Office 365 now supports external access to Teams for guests with any email address, a development that creates some questions in the minds of those who might want to add guests from non-Office 365 domains. In this article, I try and answer some common questions that you might have about guest access.

Six months after allowing users from other Office 365 domains to access Teams as guest users, Microsoft now supports access from any email address. You can now invite people to join teams from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Yandex, Outlook.com, or any other email system. The same basic Azure B2B collaboration flow is used to invite guests and redeem the invitations, so it should be a well-worn path for administrators at this stage.

Now that so many apps (like Teams) create Office 365 Groups, it’s logical that some of the groups will serve their purpose and then need to be archived. Office 365 offers no way to do this, but conceptually it’s a reasonably easy task and something that PowerShell handles with aplomb.

A recent vacation meant that I didn’t spend as much time as usual monitoring changes inside Office 365. As it happened, lots of change occurred. The large stuff (major updates for Teams and Planner) has already been covered in detail, but many other small but important changes are now active inside Office 365. And, as always, it’s the small stuff that can trip you up. Here’s what I learned after a weekend of catching up…

One of the premium features for Office 365 Groups is the ability to use a naming policy so that all groups (and Teams) have a compliant name. The policy is a nice-to-have feature if you are concerned about having a well-organized directory with all your groups gathered in the same place. The question is whether enough business value is gained from a naming policy to make it worthwhile.

Office 365 Groups (and Teams) can quickly become obsolete, but administrators need some help to find the underused groups. PowerShell comes to the rescue through a mixture of checks against the group mailbox, Office 365 audit log, and Teams compliance records. A nice HTML report is the result – and isn’t that always welcome.

Microsoft says that Office 365 will support internationalized email addresses (EAI) in Q1 2018. Support is limited to inbound and outbound email and you will not be able to assign email addresses with non-Latin characters to Office 365 accounts until all the heavy lifting is done to make sure that nothing breaks, including in hybrid organizations.

The Teams PowerShell module is flawed, but that does not mean that you cannot do work with it. Here’s a primer of the most important cmdlets, together with a link to a rather interesting approach to finding out what Office 365 Groups are team-enabled.

Office 365 Groups have been very good for SharePoint Online. Because many apps use Groups, they also use SharePoint, even if they don’t know it. Teams, Planner, Yammer, StaffHub, Stream, and Groups in Outlook (or whatever the name is this week) all drive SharePoint usage. SharePoint Online is Office 365 document management, and that’s a good thing.