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Quentin Finck's avatar
Quentin Finck
Brass Contributor
Aug 09, 2016
Solved

Nesting Groups

Am I missing something or is it not possible currently to nest O365 groups?

  • Just use Distribution lists if that's all you want, they are entirely just as available as they have ever been, fully support nesting etc.

     

    Alternatively if you read up, TonyRedmond explains that you can nest an Office 365 group within a DL via powershell if you absolutely must.

     

     

  • John Peluso's avatar
    John Peluso
    Iron Contributor

    Presumeably the "Dynamic Membership" feature will allow more intelligent Group memberships buy ensuring folks that meet certain conditions based on attributes are always members of specific Groups. Note this requires AAD Premium though. We're toying with some cool stuff in our offerings as well in the near term as we hear this ask from multiple customers.Agree with TonyRedmond that this needs to be smart though--- no one needs more AD Group nonsense like we know so well...

    • Chris Porosky's avatar
      Chris Porosky
      Copper Contributor

      This limitation is kind of crazy, sorry.  There's all these microsoft pointers to get everyone to use Office 365 groups instead of distribution groups, but they are completely two different things.  Why can't we at least forward email out of an office 365 group?  I just think it is another rushed half baked ms feature...

  • This question comes up very commonly for people who are thinking about migrating from distribution groups where nesting is supported and used extensively. Although the two constructs "Groups", one is used to address sets of people and other mail-enabled recipients (like public folders) while the other can be used in the same manner (but only user accounts) but its more important role is as an access mechanism to resources such as the calendar, notebook, document library, Power BI workspace, and so on. Because Office 365 Groups are used as an access mechanism, nesting becomes a lot more difficult than when you simply have to resolve the address list for a message and figure out how to route the various copies. It might be that nesting is supported in the future, but for now it's not to make things simpler all round. Simplicity is good as complexity invariably leads to support issues etc. etc. etc.
    • Deleted's avatar
      Deleted

      We use nested AD groups for file security and for email, so I'm not sure what sort of issues you see arising from nesting groups for the purpose of resource allocation and distribution here.  

      When you have hundreds or thousands of users to manage, keeping non-hierarchical groups in sync is a real headache.

    • Ruben Kertesz's avatar
      Ruben Kertesz
      Iron Contributor
      Would be nice, permissions aside, to at least be able to have a groups homepage where people can see groups (particularly public ones) automatically organized into a heirarchy based upon a tag used to specify where the group resides. This would require you to allow us to use tags or categorization during group creation. A little metadata please?
  • It's not, you can "add" the group but its membership is simply expanded instead of adding the actual group.
    • TonyRedmond's avatar
      TonyRedmond
      MVP
      Nesting groups creates all sorts of permissions issues. These don't occur for distribution groups, but they do when a group has a unique identity that can be used for accessing information.
      • Quentin Finck's avatar
        Quentin Finck
        Brass Contributor

        That just makes the usefulness of the O365 groups about half as useful as it could be. Instead of just keeping each individual team's group up to date and then nesting it in the department group I now have to duplicate work keeping both groups up to date. 

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