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Jaap Slot's avatar
Jaap Slot
Brass Contributor
Mar 24, 2017
Solved

Office 365 Group Naming policies and Azure Active Directory

As you start a group either in Outlook or in Teams, you put an entry in Azure Active Directory. This is also used for your Global Adress Book for Mail and Skype.  Is it possible to enforce a naming convention for the different groups? Apart of the sanitization purposes it could also be handy for future functionalities. I can imagine a function for teams to join a skype meeting together or somethin similar,..

So a way to enforce a naming convention for groups (teams) would be very helpful. I don't like the idea of unleashing a mass of unreal email adresses or users on my user population. 

  • TonyRedmond's avatar
    TonyRedmond
    Apr 28, 2018

    Looks like the naming policy is doing a pretty good job in my tenant...

     

    Office 365 Naming Policy in action

  • Joel Hazelton's avatar
    Joel Hazelton
    Copper Contributor

    I started digging into Groups management today, and I stumbled across this thread, as well as this article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-365-Groups-Naming-Policy-6ceca4d3-cad1-4532-9f0f-d469dfbbb552

     

    The article has no date, but judging from the above replies, I'm guessing it's recent. Has anybody tried this yet? It provides instructions on setting naming policy and custom blocked words, as well as includes all of the applications in which the naming policy will work. There are some limitations that puzzle me though: 

     

    "Power BI workspaces aren't compliant with naming policy yet. Power BI workspaces created in your organization with naming policies will fail."

     

    My company utilizes PowerBI. The clause above indicates that I will, therefore, not be able to implement any group naming policies on our Azure tenant, because if I do, PowerBI workspaces will fail. Am I interpreting this correctly? Is there a way I could instead isolate PowerBI from the naming convention policy? 

  • Jason Benway's avatar
    Jason Benway
    Iron Contributor

    Funny I came here to say I found another way around the group naming enforcement and found this post.

    I had set the policy so when you create a group directly it uses the correct prefix. But have since found team create bypasses it and creating a group from the sharepoint button 'create new site' also bypasses it.

     

    Now I understand why, right now its only the exchange naming that is enforced. :(

     

    really wish we'd get an update on the status of using Azure AD, but the bigger question is will it be part of the 'free' Azure AD or require an paid upgrade....

  • I don't think that this currently exists. If you want this then you could create a request list in SharePoint. In this list enforce the standards that you want and use Powershell or webjobs to scan through the requests and create the groups

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