Forum Discussion
Renaming of O365 groups
Hi all,
I tried to search to see if anyone had already asked, but did not find any answers.
Today, I renamed one of my O365 Groups, but found the experience to be underwhelming:
- No option to change the associated email address
- The OneDrive associated to the group does not get renamed, nor is there an option to do so
Are there any plans in the making to improve the remaning experience? Just renaming the group is likely to create confusion. I do understand the complexity of ensuring that a new email address, or OneDrive name is not already in use, but maybe offering the option to make the change manually, and thus have a check against existing names could work.
Thanks in advance for any information anyone can share.
Ivo
You need to use PowerShell to change group email address.
Set-UnifiedGroup –Identity <GroupName> –PrimarySmtpAddress <newemail@onmicrosoft.com>
Hi, is there anyway to do this in mac ? as far as i know powershell only available in windows,
Thankyou
Hi Mario,
You can install PowerShell on Mac from here, but at least on Dec 2017 there were still many issues with connecting to O365 from a Mac. More on this from here.
If you're managing Exchange Online, that seems to be possible from a Mac.
Kris
To add to this issue: when a naming policy is defined, and you rename the group then the naming policy suffixes can be changed as well. What happens if you save the name change: it adds again the pre- and suffixes!
So if a group admin decides to change the pre- and suffixes with the name change then the policy will be re-applied as well and if the admin changes the original given name (and leaves the suffix and prefix) then the naming policy is reapplied and you will get double pre- and postfixes!
There is already a suggestion on uservoice to make the renaming of emailaddress possible as well at https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/15585969-improve-the-renaming-functionality-of-office-365-gI added a suggestion to improve the rename with naming policy as well: https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/15586377-renaming-groups-when-renaming-a-group-with-naming
It should be possible to rename the mailaddress throught the UI, since renaming of the name is possible for end users as well. Although renaming of the mail address with Powershell can be done, it is not a feasible solution when you have a lot of groups in your tenant (e.g. schools). The rename should ideally also check for renaming the mailaddress throught the UI.
I have tested OneDrive associated to the group rename and it gets renamed properly. Rename took some time to reflect in OneDrive.
Hi Santosh,
The display name does change, but not the root name in the URL.
Ivo
The root name in url will not change.
I'm currently also looking into changing a office 365 group name. i'm aware of the powershell with the PrimarySmtpaddress paramiter. however, i'm also aware that this does not necessarily change the email address but sets the new defined email address as an alias. so my main question for clarity would be if i wear to run this command and add the new email address as an alias, will this change the default/display address of the group to the new email address? so the new email address displays as the default one but the onmicrosoft one is still in the background making everything work?
Thank you in advance for any assistance
- Can someone clear up some questing I have on naming groups? We want to roll out Office 35 Groups in our organization but need to define our Governance in how these are named and found in our GAL, etc. There are a few fields that seem to define a group name but the PowerShell documentation isn't specifically clear on what difference there is between a "name" "identity" "displayName" and "alias". We also need a prefix to be appended to the name for the GAL but I don't want that Prefix to show up in Outlook or OWA on the group list for users. Where exactly do these group names show up and how can I best plan to use these parameters in Powershell when creating the groups. Too many options are not exposed in the GUI to make group creation in the enterprise worth doing at this time.
Ivo Essenberg You can add a proxy address to the Unified Group /Office 365 Group and then set the new email address as the primary email address. This will change the email address associated with the group. This might not modify the URL of SPO although.
- For this connect to EXO PowerShell and run the below command to add required SMTP as an alias.
- Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "abc@contoso.com" -EmailAddresses: @{Add ="xyz@contoso.com"} where abc@contoso.com is the email address of the Office 365 group and xyz@contoso.com is the required Email ID.
- Promote alias as a primary SMTP address, Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "Test O365Group" -PrimarySmtpAddress "xyz@contoso.com"
- If not required, you can remove the first ID using below command. Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "xyz@contoso.com" -EmailAddresses: @{Remove="abc@contoso.com"}
Please note, For updating the Office 365 group SMTP address required Global Administrator access.
