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
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.
"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 But how many admins, external members, or vendors would go in a group of direct reports?
If you're going to create a group called "John Doe Direct Reports", then that name seems odd if it turns out to be "John Doe Direct Reports + Some External Vendors and Some IT Admins", doesn't it?
The owner of a group has the flexibility to update the group name, description, membership at any point. If they would like to change the name to "John Doe's team" they can do so.
Details on how to make update/delete group can be found in this article.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Automatic-creation-of-Direct-Reports-groups-in-Outlook-f43455ed-81a6-4588-8299-08caa62abedd
