Forum Discussion
Manage automatic creation of direct reports group
THANK YOU all for your feedback, please see an update in this new thread: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Update-Auto-creation-of-Direct-Reports-group-in-Outlook-MC96611/m-p/55318#M2740
First time I'm aware of this feature cfiessinger TonyRedmond any comments?
I haven't seen this feature. It might not yet have been deployed. It might also be a feature designed for small tenants.
I do not think this is a good idea for large to enterprise tenants. In fact, it is a rotten idea. Enterprise tenants like to control their GAL and this sounds like a way to clutter that GAL up with a profusion of groups that will quickly become an uncontrollable mess. Unless, of course, Microsoft is going to update the newly-created groups on an ongoing basis to adjust membership based on changing reporting relationships. Creating groups is easy; maintaining them over time is bloody hard. That's why many enterprises have their own solutions (often integrated with HR processes) to do this kind of thing. It is a special challenge when organizations do not populate AAD with reporting relationships - or keep this data current, a problem that is more prevalent than you might think.
It's an example of a bright idea that looked good on a whiteboard but might be horrible in the field.
Now I look forward to be proven wrong by the disclosure of a super-competenent system for tracking reporting relationships across large organizations and behind-the-scenes automatic adjustment of group memberships, removal of unwanted groups, and so on.
> Unless, of course, Microsoft is going to update the newly-created groups on an ongoing basis to adjust membership based on changing reporting relationships.
I've no special knowledge, but I expect they will be dynamic groups so self updating.
It doesnt seem like a great idea to me, and we are certainly going to turn it off. Many users have already created groups, this would be huge duplication. It would create thousands of groups in our environment.
I don't think dynamic groups will work.
First, they depend on AAD. If the data is not in AAD or is incorrect, the queries will not find the right people and you might end up sending information to the wrong recipients.
Second, Microsoft requires any user account that comes under the scope of a dynamic Office 365 Group to have an AAD premium license. That's fine if you have EMS or have bought the AAD licenses, but not so good otherwise. Perhaps they are changing their licensing policy - if so, that will be welcome and the right thing to do because dynamic email distribution groups are free.
But the big flaw in all of this is the dependency on AAD. If you are 100% perfect in maintaining AAD, you have a chance that this plan will work. If not, it won't. That's the reason why many large enterprises use processes tied to HR systems (which serve as the definitive source of reporting relationships) to generate groups (email DLs, not Office 365 groups).
TR
The feature is described as being an automatic group created of direct reports, so fundamentally the group must be based on the data for manager/reports in AAD. Where else would it get this information from.
I reckon it'll be an exception to the licensing requirements for AAD Premium, they aren't going to build another mechanism to do the same thing as an existing feature to work around a licensing limit.
After thinking about this plan for several days, I conclude that it is flawed and will cause more bother than it is worth. I confirmed my feeling that few companies have the necessary accuracy in AAD to make this worthwhile by asking Cogmotive to run a query against their dataset of Office 365 mailboxes. Without compromising user confidentially in any way, they discovered that only 45% of the mailboxes they record for reporting purposes have the necessary ManagedBy property in place. This is a plan that works for companies that pay attention to AAD, but not for others.
I also have huge doubt about the way that Microsoft is using customer data to generate new objects for the GAL. That seems dubious under EU data protection guidelines.
In any case, here's the article:
Microsoft plans to auto-generate Office 365 Groups for managers to enable them to collaborate better with employees. Sounds good, until you realize that the reporting relationships stored in Azure Active Directory drive the process. And we all know how reliable that information really is.
https://www.petri.com/microsoft-auto-generate-office-365-groups
Very well put, and agree with your findings.
Our "ManagedBy" is 100% (integrated AD with our HR system, changes update in AD every 3 hours, and sync to AAD every 30 minutes), however I received an email from a Microsoft PM that stated our organization didnt qualify for auto-creation because:
From email:
"Before creating any groups in the organization we have special logic that verifies whether an O365 Group has been created with the manager and reports already or not...a Group will only be auto created when the organizational structure is set up for the company, and it appears that we don’t have the proper information to auto create these groups in <my company>".
If ours is not good enough, no one's is good enough.
The phrase "couldn't manage a p*** up in a brewery" comes to mind...
We got this message in our tenant, which has 40k+ users, so it wasn't limited to only smaller shops.
Like others have said, this is a horrible idea.
