A curious problem happened when a mailbox reported hitting a folder item limit (one million items). The mailbox was an aggregate group mailbox, a system mailbox used to make it easier to search Microsoft 365 Groups. Microsoft now uses a different method to search group mailboxes and will remove these arbitration mailboxes by the end of 2021. If you meet the problem, use a mail flow rule to stop messages being delivered to the mailbox.
Microsoft is changing the default setting for guest access to Teams from Off to On. This won’t affect tenants already using Teams, but it’s a good opportunity to review how guest access is used in tenants and consider whether existing guest accounts are needed or can be removed. This post offers some ideas about using policies to control guests and how to check what these accounts are used for.
Outlook for Windows has a Groups menu bar which is displayed when conversations in a Microsoft 365 group are accessed. A new Teams button is available to bring users to the General channel of team-enabled groups. It’s an interesting decision by Microsoft to add the button because I am not quite sure if any need exists for such a facility.
Among some interesting statistics offered at the Ignite 2020 conference, we learned that 79% of Microsoft 365 groups successfully auto-renewed because of their activity. That leaves 21% of groups which didn’t meet the bar to be automatically renewed. Only groups within the scope of an expiration policy are included, but even so millions of groups weren’t renewed. Is that a problem?
Outlook for Windows has supported Microsoft 365 Groups since 2015. The developers chose a seen/unseen model for Groups, but now Outlook has switched to a read/unread model, meaning that the unread counts for Groups can suddenly seem much higher than before. It’s a one-time change that aligns Outlook desktop with OWA and Outlook Mobile and there’s an easy way to set all unread items to be read. But you might want to tell people that this change is coming!
Once Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams reach the end of their useful life, it’s good to archive them so that their data stays online and available for eDiscovery. A recent request looked for help to archive 600 Groups at the end of the academic year. The script described here might help solve the problem.
The Groups section of the Microsoft 365 admin center has been overhauled recently and several useful changes were made. Restore deleted groups is the headline act, but the other updates also deliver value. Collectively, they make Groups easier to manage.
You can apply an Office 365 Sensitivity Label to control different aspects of Groups, Teams, and Sites. One of the settings controls whether guest users are allowed in group membership. We explain how to use PowerShell to search groups assigned a label to block guest access for existing guests, just in case you want to remove them.
Office 365 Groups (and their underlying teams and sites) can be removed by user action or automatically through the Groups expiration policy. By examining records in the Office 365 audit log, we can track exactly when groups are soft-deleted followed by permanent removal 30 days later. All done with a few lines of PowerShell and some parsing of the audit data held in the records.
After a couple of years, it’s time to update the Office 365 Groups and Teams Activity Report script. Written in PowerShell, the script analyzes the groups in an Office 365 tenant to figure out if each group or team is in active use. Because it’s a PowerShell script, you can amend the code to your heart’s content.
Microsoft 365 applications create lots of Azure Active Directory guest accounts. Here’s how to find old accounts and check their membership of Microsoft 365 groups. If you know the accounts that are old and stale and aren’t members of any Microsoft 365 group, you can consider removing them from your tenant.
Every Office 365 group (and team) has a SharePoint site. But how to find the URLs of all the sites used by teams in a tenant. One PowerShell answer came from Syskit, but it’s an old technique and we can do better now by fetching a list of teams in the tenant and then retrieving the URL for each team-enabled group.
It’s easy to create a webhook connector to post information to a team channel or an Microsoft 365 group. What might not be quite so easy is formatting the JSON payload. Here’s how to use a template card to simplify the process.
Microsoft has updated the Forms application with the ability for a form owner to move a a form from their personal space to an Office 365 Group. It’s a small but good improvement.
The latest version of the Teams desktop and browser clients support the creation of dynamic teams based on dynamic Office 365 Groups. The functionality is welcome, as long as you can pay for it as every member who comes within the scope of a query used for a dynamic team needs an Azure AD P1 license.
By default, the Groups policy for an Office 365 tenant allows group owners to add guest users to group membership. You can block this access if necessary, but it’s probably not what you want to do as blocking brings guest access to a complete halt across the tenant.
Many Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams are used to hold confidential information. Sometimes you don’t want guest members to have access to the information. A variety of methods are available to control guest access.
This article describes how to run the New-UnifiedGroup cmdlet to create Microsoft 365 groups with multiple group owners.
