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
Surprised to see this appear in my (and my customers') Message Center. At first blush this does seem like a very poor idea.
What if the manager already has a DL for their reports that they're happy with? They get a Group created anyway?
What if the manager already has a Group, or a Team that is being actively used? They get Yet Another Group created anyway?
Will the Group membership be auto-adjusted over time? Nothing indicates that it will.
If an auto-created Group is deleted, does it get recreated automatically later?
This seems like a semi-useful feature if it was opt-in, so you could carefully set up your reports/manager relationships, turn it on, and have them automatically created and managed. But as an opt-out feature, I am concerned this will mess up the GAL of many organizations, and mess it up quite badly.
- Hi Paul,
If the manager already has a group created it shouldn't create another group. Also if the auto-created group gets deleted it shouldn't be automatically recreated later. Group membership is NOT dynamic - so once it's auto-created the manager will have to add/remove members as appropriate.
Hope that helps!"If the manager already has a group created it shouldn't create another group.:
Exchange distribution group or Office 365 Group"? Auto-created Group or manually created Group?
Let's say you've got an IT Ops team, the manager is Jane Tulley, she has 4 direct reports (with relationships already set up in AD), and they have one of the following *already in place*...
1) A distribution group (little g) named "IT Operations" that they use for email communication only. They're happy with this and deliberately have chosen an Exchange distribution group for this purpose (especially now that emails sent to Groups don't get delivered to the sender), and they manage the membership of the Exchange distribution group as needed. With Groups auto-creation, they'll also end up with a "Jane Tulley Direct Reports" Group (big G), and now they have two things to manage the membership of. Or they delete the unneeded Group, which you say won't be recreated. How does it know not to recreate? Can anything trigger re-creation of an auto-created Group, like a change in Manager/Reports relationships?
2) A Group (big G) called "IT Operations" that they use for email comms, Planner, Teams, file storage, OneNote stuff, all the good things that Groups provide, because they've bought into the Groups concept. Does auto-creation still create a "Jane Tulley Direct Reports" Group for them with the exact same members? If so, it has done so for no benefit whatsoever.
This whole conversation would be different if the feature was opt-in and the behavior was communicated more clearly from the outset. We'd be discussing with customers how best to leverage the feature, e.g. by setting up all your Manager/Reports relationships first, letting managers know they'll get this Group to communicate with their direct reports, then flipping the switch to enable auto-creation (PS - a way to phase the roll out of this within your tenant would be helpful, to avoid Help Desk overwhelm when hundreds/thousands of Groups suddenly appear).
But as Vasil has already mentioned, the value of this feature is diminished by the lack of dynamic membership. For the average Joe Bloggs or Jane Doe, having a Group of their direct reports that they can easily send email to is a nice thing to have, but having to maintain membership is a pain. That's the sort of thing they expect technology to solve for them, e.g. by having the Manager/Reports relationships all set up properly and maintained by IT or a HR system ongoing.
An Office 365 Group will be autocreated if there exists a distribution group, however if the manager and direct reports have an Office 365 Group(manual or autocreated) then another Group will not be created.
1) We only create a Group one time regardless of if the manager deletes or uses the group. We also don't create another Group if the manager moves teams.
2) No. Regardless of the name of the Group, if the membership of the existing Group consists of the manger and direct reports we will not auto create another one.
We have decided to go with the approach of non dynamic membership, because we find that many teams include admins, external members, vendors, etc., who are not necessarily part of the reporting chain. We wanted to allow group owners to flexibly update the group membership if needed.
- This whole concept keeps sounding worse and worse. It blows my mind that more than one person within the PG must've thought this was a good idea.
Well, if it's not dynamic, how exaclty are you going to sell the need for this at all? I sure hope you put this part in BIG letters in the documentation, as it can create all sorts of problems.
I could really see a use for such feature *if* it was dynamic, but even then had some reservations about the default opt-in. If it's not even dynamic, it should be disabled by default. Or something like a simple email notification to managers, with an embedded link to provision the group or similar, if they see the need for it.
- SCENARIO 1
So my manager is responsible for a team called ITCS. So we have created a Group called ITCS. All of his direct reports are already part of this group. In this scenario, he would now have the ITCS group that was created by his choice, and a secondary group called "PG's Direct Reports" that have nothing to do with with the formal group.
SCENARIO 2
We have a revolving door of sales managers coming and going. This has the potential to create all kinds of duplicates. Steve has a team of 3 sales reps. Group - Steve's Direct Report gets created. Steve leaves. 3 sales reps transition to Joe. Group - Joe's Direct Reports gets created. Steve's Direct Reports remains out there (abandoned with no owner, clogging up our GAL, increasing the number of unnecessary Groups in a list of Groups)
SCENARIO 3
Manager John has a team called John's Direct Reports. John retires in June. All of his Team's documents, conversations, tasks, etc have been (carefully) loaded into this Group. Bill takes over. A Group gets created for Bill called "Bill's Direct Reports". Users from John's group now are confused and don't know if they should update files in John's old group, Bill's new group. John's old group is abandoned and a "mini migration" needs to be made of old content.
In each case, Microsoft would have auto-provisioned a group that either needs to be immediately deleted, or would prompt a migration of content (probably IT resources) to accommodate. The CONS list is immensely larger than the PROs list in every scenario I can think of.
- cfiessinger
Microsoft
cfiessinger can you confirm my thinking on something here... when it states "automatic group creation"...we are talking about an Office 365 Group (I've seen this stated as "connected group"). So this isn't just a Group in Outlook (a distribution list on steriods)? This is a fully fledged security group, distribution list, plus you'll get a OneDrive for Business folder, SharePoint site, Yammer group, Planner plan etc. etc. provisioned as well? This seems like a lot of moving parts that may not get used and sit stale and most likely be innaccurate membership.
Obviously this isn't that big of a concern I think. At hyperfish we're seeing that most organizations don't have the manager field populated for users, around 40% of users we've analyzed do. We can clearly help with completing and ensuring up-to-date manager fields.
- cfiessingerPlease see this: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Automatic-creation-of-Direct-Reports-groups-in-Outlook-f43455ed-81a6-4588-8299-08caa62abedd
Note document storage for Office 365 Groups is a SharePoint team site and NOT OneDrive; Office 365 Groups are NOT Distribution Groups nor Security Groups.
This is one of the worst ideas I've seen come out of Redmond for years, if not ever. And that's saying something.
I've NEVER seen an organization with more than a few hundred people where the Active Directory data is even close to useful. Two of the prime things that are almost always wrong are Department and Manager. Manager most often contains the person you originally worked for when you were hired - if it contains anyone. There's a reason why Hyperfish is a fantastic product idea. So I would wager that a HUGE percentage of the Groups which would be gcreated are going to be meaningless.
Managers have all sorts of ways they work with their employees. If they want to use a Group, that's great, but assuming that it's the right answer for every manager who uses Office 365 is ridiculous. If I have two employees who sit right there with me, I'll never use the Group, even if it's a great idea.
Most people who use SharePoint - even after all these years - struggle with where to "put their stuff". This will automatically create Yet Another Location for Stuff which they will need to rationalize against. Again, they may get it and they may not, but if they don't WANT the Group, then why on earth would you create it?
Managers come and go, there are dotted line reporting structueres, etc. There is simply no way that all of the most common scenarios can possibly be covered here. Any decent-sized organization is going to end up with hundreds or thousands of orphaned or useless Groups.
What about all the governance questions? What happens when a Manager leaves? How does the content in a Group get archived or preserved if a position is eliminated? People sometimes have more than one manager - for real. AD has never supported this, and the Group here won't either - at least well.
The list of reasons why this shouldn't happen is incredibly long, and the reasons that make it a good idea are few - assuming there are any. I can only guess that it's yet another instance where someone at Microsoft's bonus is tied to the number of Groups "deployed". Full speed ahead and **bleep** the customers.
cfiessinger I've read that article several times (before I posted) and it doesn't answer my questions.
Unless you're saying it does actually answer my questions, in which case the wording is unclear because I'm not seeing the answers.
- cfiessingergreat feedback on how our documentation can improve (note you can provide feedback directly at the very bottom of each article).
Yeah...most of the organisations I work with have poor implementations of ManagedBy, so I guess I'll scoot around and turn this off for now!
What's next - Groups for Country and Groups for Office and Groups for Department? That'll be great when "HR" and "Human Resources" and "HR/Payroll" get different Groups created.
