Forum Discussion

Mike McLean (OFFICE)'s avatar
Mike McLean (OFFICE)
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Aug 17, 2017

Office 365 Groups will now have unique mailNickname

Hi all,   We've completed an enhancement with the Azure Active Directory team which will now enforce mailNickname to be unique across all Office 365 Groups within a tenant. This will help ensure ...
groups
office 365
Office 365 Groups
SjoerdV's avatar
SjoerdV
Iron Contributor
Aug 12, 2019

This change is messing with some of our provisioning techniques. The MailNickName / Alias was a 'sure thing' property to use across ecosystems. In the Azure AD, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online realms that single property was unifying everything. All of a sudden this property is changed to a guid behind the scenes with no apparent rhythm to it.

 

Question: What unifying property should now be used that can be created and queried in Azure AD, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online? BTW It was suggested to me to use the Exchange Online ExtensionAttribute1-15 properties, but these are not queryable (to my knowledge) in Azure AD.

 

Question2: Can we disable the automatic changing of MailNickName / Alias by backend processes to guids and be in charge ourselves? Ie. manage the Alias ourselves?

 

Thanks!

TonyRedmond's avatar
TonyRedmond
MVP
Aug 12, 2019

SjoerdV You're right that the Exchange extension properties are unavailable in Azure AD. They're very much an Exchange construct.

 

It seems to me that GUIDs are the only way to ensure uniqueness across Office 365, and that's why the developers use GUIDs everywhere.

Resources