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.
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.
Madhuri Tondepu wrote:We wanted to allow group owners to flexibly update the group membership if needed.
That sounds like something that should be a user-selectable option then. A simple toggle for the Group owner to say whether they want it dynamically maintained based on the AD manager/reports relationships, or manually maintained.
Apologies too if this discussion is become fragmented. We're all clearly brainstorming out "what if's" and the way these forums sort replies starts to get a bit confusing.
- 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.For Scenario 1 - A new group shouldn't be created because an existing group already exists (even though the name is different).
For Scenario 2 - I'd probably recommend disabling auto creation of groups for that company and letting them continue to manage groups manually.
For Scenario 3 - When Bill takes over as manager of John's group he should be added to the group as the owner (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Assign-a-new-owner-to-an-orphaned-group-86bb3db6-8857-45d1-95c8-f6d540e45732) and the system shouldn't create a new group for him.
By the way - Bill, as the new owner, can also change the display name of the group if he likes so that it would now say "Bill's Direct Reports" (or whatever he likes) instead of "John's..."
Hope that helps!
How ?
How does it know if they've already got a direct reports group ? Does it look at the membership of all their groups and see if they match with all direct report ? what if there was one non-direct report in a group would it then create a new group ?
What happens in future, if a new user gets to their 2nd direct report does the group get created ? or is this a one time thing ?
Presumably the statement means that a new auto-created group will not be created if an auto-created group already exists for the manager. Auto-created groups are identified by a property (GroupPersonification is set to "Groupsona:AutoDirectReports"), so I guess that is the check that is made.
Presumably the statement means that a new auto-created group will not be created if an auto-created group already exists for the manager. Auto-created groups are identified by a property (GroupPersonification is set to "Groupsona:AutoDirectReports"), so I guess that is the check that is made.
TR
- Actually it won't create a new group if any group (auto-created or manually-created) already exists for that manager and their direct reports.
