So, You Can Disable Office 365 Groups After All

After my recent post “You Can’t Disable Office 365 Groups”, I received feedback from a few people, specifically Elaine Van Bergen,
Martina Grom and Joe Stocker that some editing controls have been added in through the tenant that allows Group creation to be disabled in the Office 365 tenant, and that these controls affect all of the user interfaces that can create groups. The procedure is outlined here, and Martina offers her insight on it here . I was a little disappointed that I had missed these newer controls earlier, but quite happy about the discussion that the original article started. It brought to light some of the confusion around this feature. In addition, it also highlights the fact that Office 365 Groups are about far more than just conversations, they are the bedrock of all Office 365 services moving forward.

Having said that, and having tested these new controls, I have a few observations to make about disabling Groups.

Much of the feedback that I received of my original article was “Good, they shouldn’t be disabled anyway, they’re too important”. To be sure the other side of that argument was heard from as well, but I tend to side with the former. For me at least, the group construct represents real value. It is a trade-off between ease of use and control to be sure, but as a container, it’s easy to understand, and relatively easy to work with for end users. The concerns around Groups are focused on governance, and those concerns are valid. If anyone can create a group anytime, and there is not process for organizing or classifying them in place, they can quickly get out of hand, producing islands of information all over.

The new management controls allow for a single security group (not an Office 365 group) to define those that can create Groups. Groups created by these members are available to all, but only these members can create new Groups. Only one security group can be flagged for group creation, so it’s an all or nothing proposition for these group members.

The article above walks through the process of creating these controls through PowerShell with the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Module for Windows. There are a couple of quirks when walking through this process. I found that the article itself contains a typo, the PowerShell command “Get-MsolCompanyInfo” should actually be “Get-MsolCompanyInformation”. In addition, when downloading the module itself, the 1.1.130.0 Preview version is required.

One would think that the GA version (1.1.166.0) would include everything necessary, but one would be wrong. I made the mistake of trying to use that version and I hit a wall. You need the preview version.

The Azure Active Directory management area in the new Azure portal also allows for the management of group creation rights. I was unable to use the interface to initially set these controls, but once set, the controls were reflected in the user interface, and it’s possible to manage them. Azure Active Directory management is still in preview in the new portal, so presumably this will improve at GA. The controls can be found in the Azure Active Directory blade under Users and Groups – Group Settings.

Like their predecessor, these controls don’t remove the option to create a group from the client interfaces. Once the “Create” option is selected, the user is usually notified that this will not be possible. In one case, it simply fails. The following are the different messages that users will receive when they try to create a new Group but are prevented from doing so.

Outlook Web Access

SharePoint

Planner

Power BI

Microsoft Teams

Ideally, the create option would simply be removed from the user interface, but at least these interfaces prevent the user from filling out details before failing with one notable exception. When a new Group Workspace is created in Power BI, the operation simply fails, and the user isn’t notified as to why. It almost seems as if the Power BI team wasn’t notified that these new controls exist.

The remaining workload that is (ok – will be) integrated with Groups is Yammer. With Yammer, when a Yammer Group is created, a corresponding Office 365 group will be created, and kept in sync with the Yammer group construct. This will ultimately be where Yammer notes and files are stored (via OneNote and OneDrive – basically SharePoint) as well as the group calendar (in Exchange). However, according to this Microsoft support article, if Office 365 Group creation is disabled, then the Yammer groups will not be Office 365 connected.

It therefore is now possible to prevent users from creating Office 365 Groups. This will be important to large organizations while they formulate an adoption strategy for Groups, but formulate it they should. Just because Groups can be disabled, it doesn’t mean that they should. Groups are by their very nature a compromise between usability and manageability, and centralizing creation tips the scales on the side of manageability. We’ve had this for a long time with classic SharePoint, and the usability of Groups is what’s so exciting from an adoption standpoint. Almost all innovations in the Office 365 space are now centered on Groups – they are the new foundational unit, and by ignoring them, you miss out on much of the future enhancements.

Caution is certainly advised, but it’s a good idea to move forward with a Groups strategy. Now.