Forum Discussion
Hiding Office 365 Groups Created by Teams from Exchange Clients
PhilHemingwaySTV I'm sure that every team does turn up in the GAL, but only if an action is taken to update its HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled property. All teams created through team-aware admin interfaces set this property to $False. If you create using an ISV app, PowerShell, or some Graph-enabled app, you might find that the property is set to $True. For instance, even Teams sets the property to $True for the special team it creates to control who's allowed to create approvals templates. But the general point holds true: teams created through Teams set HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled to $False.
Here's the relevant part of their email response, "When you create it from PowerShell or the Teams admin center it will be visible. Please create from the Teams App and observe the behavior (the group should be hidden by default)."
Specifically, teams created through the Teams admin interface are visible in the GAL. We require that new teams be created by admins, so our users are prevented from creating their own in the app... and for admins it was natural to create teams through the Teams admin interface. Every last one since we deployed Teams to the company is showing in the GAL. I'd have to get a colleague to run the Exchange PowerShell command for me since I'm not the Exchange admin, but I don't doubt at all they're set to $True.
So it's pretty frustrating that Microsoft documentation says when you create a team in Teams it will not show in the GAL, because this has not been the case at all for our organization, and I feel like it's a glaring error that needs to be corrected.
- Right. There's a known gap at present (documented in Office 365 for IT Pros https://gum.co/O365IT/ that the Teams admin center doesn't hide newly created teams. When you create new teams with PowerShell or the Graph, you have full control over the parameters of what the newly created team should do, including the ability to tweak the group hidden setting. But every group created using the Teams desktop, browser, or mobile client should be hidden.
Fortunately, the solution is easy. Have someone with admin permissions connect to Exchange Online PowerShell and run these two lines:
[array]$Groups = Get-UnifiedGroup -Filter {ResourceProvisioningOptions -eq "Team"} -ResultSize Unlimited
ForEach ($Group in $Groups) { Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity $Group.ExternalDirectoryObjectId -HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled:$True -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled:$True }It's been a while since I looked at this situation in detail. I went back and checked what's happening and document it in:
How to Hide Teams-Enabled Groups from Exchange OnlineNew teams created using Teams clients are hidden from Exchange Online, but those created using administrative interfaces are not. The result is potential confusion. in this post, we describe a PowerShell script to find any team-enabled Microsoft 365 Groups which are visible to Exchange and hide them. It’s easy scripting, but you need to run the script periodically to adjust new teams.
https://office365itpros.com/2021/07/08/how-hide-teams-enabled-groups-from-exchange-online/
Bit of a shame that there's no easy flick switch to make the M365 Group that arises as a result of a Team being created, to be visible in Exchange Clients, instead we're having to resort to PowerShell + admin rights.
The M365 Group Calendar itself is probably one of the most useful - as any Teams Channel Meeting scheduled within a Team will appear in that Team's M365 Group Calendar. However, for most teams created after 2018, this Group Calendar can't be used to schedule appointments which don't have a meeting associated with it.
Ironically there's also a Group Calendar web part in SharePoint Modern! Which now is only able to display Teams Meetings. The Event List that can be created as part of a SharePoint site is not useful in this regard, as it requires the end user to sync the "calendar" (which is a SharePoint list) to Outlook manually, and of course, it won't have all of their Teams Channel Meetings.
So whilst I appreciate others in here that are frustrated with the Groups surfacing in Exchange Clients, there's another batch of us who are frustrated at exactly the reverse 😂
