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Tenant wide way to stop new Office365 Groups appearing in Exchange Online GAL
Hi,
We have come across an issue that many are facing - namely Office 365 Groups created via various Office 365 apps (Planner, Teams, SharePoint, etc) have made a mess out of our Exchange Online GA...
There has been some movement on this topic recently, with plans announced to clean up the clutter created by Groups/Teams in Outlook (https://twitter.com/Anne_Michels/status/971485479798415360). As for cleaning up the GAL, I haven't heard anything, but I would definitely appreciate an option similar to the Mailbox plans we have for regular mailboxes, where we can preconfigure some settings.
At my company student are creating around 250 groups a week.
We had the same issue with the groups showing up in the GAL
Also we found that some names like (management) were also used in the newly created groups, leading to confusing which one was the right mail address.
Now I have a script running every hour that gets all the groups and then it does the following (snippet):
$GALshownGroups = Get-UnifiedGroup -ResultSize Unlimited -Filter {CustomAttribute2 -eq $null}
foreach ($group in $GALshownGroups){
Set-Unifiedgroup -identity $group.PrimarySmtpAddress -CustomAttribute2 "GALhidden" -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true
}
The custom attribute is used to store if the group has been processed. Some groups are allowed to be visible so I only get the groups that have nothing filled there. That way I don't have to retrieve all the groups.
Would be a lot better ofcoz that HiddenFromAddressListEnabled can be set to a default value that you can change based on the companies policy
Thanks for the tip. Still a bit ridiculous that we're all "working around" this fundamental problem. Microsoft really needs to address this. The GAL has been a critical component of organization's for years -- allow it to devolve into a wasteland for IT administrators to chase clean-up of is disappointing.
