Forum Discussion
Recommendations on Naming Conventions for O365 Groups
For us it is a huge problem that Microsoft keeps changing everything to use Groups without giving us the necessary admin controls. I can see that the AAD naming policy is still in development, which probably means it will take at least six months before it is rolled out. Until then we are stuck with our users screaming at us to enable all the new features being announced. Of course, we can create the Groups for them manually, but we really don't have the staff for this. And I don't see that as the intention for Groups.
Any suggestions on how we can start using the features relying on Groups without ending in chaos would be greatly appreciated.
- Brent EllisNov 23, 2016Silver ContributorWe disabled group creation in AAD and made it so that our admin team can create groups on request (this is how our organization currently does all requests for SP sites, email groups, etc, so it made sense). This is to prevent the kind of chaos that you are referring to, ensure we dont have unnecessary duplication, and have some kind of structure. We are only on at the beginning of the process, but we did get out ahead of it before it could run rampid.
 And I know, blah blah, empowering end users and shadow IT and all those buzz words, but my biggest complaint against Groups has always been provisioning so much garbage that isnt needed, it makes a massive mess of things for IT.
 Someone else mentioned in another thread, it would be potentially a good practice to do some PowerShell scripting and to do something like this: get all groups, if it doesnt have GRP- on the front, add it, otherwise skip:
 $O365Groups = Get-UnifiedGroup
 foreach ($O365Group in $O365Groups){
 Write-Host $O365Group.DisplayName
 if($O365Group.DisplayName -like "GRP-*"){
 Write-Host "OK" -ForegroundColor Green
 } else {
 Write-Host "Not OK" -ForegroundColor Red
 Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity $O365Group.Name -DisplayName ("GRP-"+($O365Group.DisplayName))
 }
 }- escuphamApr 21, 2017Iron ContributorBrent Ellis, do you hide O365 Groups from your GAL?
 With adding a prefix to all groups, what happens to SharePoint sites that are created as O365 Group Connected? Do the sites assume the prefix too?- Brent EllisApr 21, 2017Silver ContributorWe don't hide ours from the GAL (at least havent had a need to yet)
 We are replacing old Distribution Lists in AD (most of which have been out of date) with each group that gets created if it existed
 For the SharePoint site, we add "group_groupnamehere" as the alias, so it's site becomes https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/group_groupnamehere, and the email address is group_groupnamehere@company.com. But the display name is "GROUP - Group Name Here"
 
- Apr 13, 2017Also I have started moving to a naming standard of "ogrp-" for O365 Groups vs other Groups.
 
- Tony RaduanoNov 23, 2016Copper ContributorWe are in the same boat. We have disabled (as best we can) everything with O365 Groups. We can't have someone creating a new one as "President@comanyx.com" or just something vulgar in our GAL. User's also don't know a group they create in OWA it is listed in the GAL (such as "my sister's wedding" that someone created in ours). All other similar institutions we talk to are doing the same. Please give us admin controls on the naming conventions and the ability to remove them from the GAL. - cfiessingerNov 23, 2016Microsoft As mentioned on our public roadmap and at Ignite in this session we are working on these three features around naming policies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfox9-L5Xt0 - naming policy - banned words - profanity checking Directory management – what’s next - mco365Jan 18, 2018MCTThe difficulty we are facing with this model for naming policies is that it exploits only attributes of the currently logged-in user, hence an automated procedure won't be able to rely on that (e.g. the "create on behalf of" could be a great feature here ). Add the variety of the business needs, e.g. create groups for projects/initiatives, or ad-hoc groups or departmental teams, etc. leads to making use of administrator's exceptions mostly at all times. So we ended up every time into providing a form enabling collection of a various parameters, that get concatenated to fit the purpose of the customer, curated to escape spaces and other unwanted characters, and ultimately the prefix / suffix are merely used to add small things to match A-AD requirements set by admins. A most appropriate solution should allow the definition of a formula, e.g. RegEx language, and injection of parameters via a pre-defined syntax to abide by, instead of exploiting user's attributes.