Forum Discussion
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.
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.
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.
We 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))
}
}
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))
}
}
- Brent 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?- We 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"
- Also I have started moving to a naming standard of "ogrp-" for O365 Groups vs other Groups.
