Forum Discussion

Brent Ellis's avatar
Brent Ellis
Silver Contributor
Nov 18, 2016

Recommendations on Naming Conventions for O365 Groups

What are others out there doing for their naming conventions on O365 Groups?  Looking for recommendations, whats working well, what might not be necessary after you implemented it, etc.
groups
Office 365 Groups
Deleted's avatar
Deleted
Nov 23, 2016
We are a company with a single tenant for about a handful of sub-companies. We are completely stuck in our Office 365 roll-out because everything nowadays relies of Groups and there is no way to enforce a naming policy. We prefix our DLs with a short prefix identifying the relevant company and we want to do this for Groups as well, since Groups are listed in the GAL. Currently we're getting spammed with all sorts of weird names because people create Groups via Power BI, Planner and all kinds of places that don't respect the policy we have set in Exchange.

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.
Tony Raduano's avatar
Tony Raduano
Copper Contributor
Nov 23, 2016

We 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.

  • cfiessinger's avatar
    cfiessinger
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Nov 23, 2016

    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

    • mco365's avatar
      mco365
      MCT
      Jan 18, 2018

      The 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. 

    • David Slight's avatar
      David Slight
      Iron Contributor
      Apr 08, 2017
      Will we be able to manage special characters as well?
      • Drew Madelung's avatar
        Drew Madelung
        MVP
        Apr 12, 2017

        Interesting this is the first I am seeing this being Premium required. I also see guidelines and classifications are marked as premium. These currently don't require premium so why the change? What about the tenants that are using classifications and guidelines that aren't using premium currently? 

         

        cfiessinger

    • Deleted's avatar
      Deleted
      Apr 06, 2017

      I see on the Office blog that the Azure AD Naming Conventions will be available within the next 3 months. That is really great.

       

      Unfortunately it requires Azure AD Premium...

       

      It is really disappointing that every time Microsoft adds something to the cloud service portfolio, we have to pay more. They're continously adding extra layers of higher tier subscriptions and suites. I wonder when we will see the E7 plan...

       

       

      https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/06/whats-new-in-office-365-groups-for-april-2017/