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
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!
- This doesnt make sense, how on earth would it know that?
For scenario 1, I created the Group on his behalf. So I don't know how the system would assume that, unless it is looking at all users, and all groups that MIGHT contain all of their direct reports, and assume that is a "Direct Reports" group. Note, there are some non-direct reports in the Group as well.
For Scenario 3, the assumption is we are a few days behind re-assigning Group owner. I'm assuming the job to create Groups runs on a fairly recent schedule. So unless we are on the ball for terminations and moves (which we are always not), I do believe this would create a competing Group.