Forum Discussion
Warning: Provocative post - When is MS going to kill Groups?
I think you have a lot of potential terminology collision going on here that would be best to clarify.
When you're saying Groups, I believe you mean "Outlook Groups" and not "Office 365 Groups". People still confuse these constantly as there has never been good documentation from Microsoft and the shared name is not helping at all.
Office 365 Groups are the membership construct that underpins all the various tools and services in Office 365.
Outlook Groups is the email based communication and collaboration method that attempts to centralize all the tools and services in the Outlook/OWA interface, although not very successfully at this point as you pointed out. These use an Office 365 Group as their membership service to determine who has access.
All three communication methods (Outlook, Teams, and Yammer) use Office 365 Groups as their membership service now. Much of the confusion was created when Office 365 Groups and Outlook Groups were released at the same time and not differentiated at all. This resulted in everyone calling the email based communication method an Office 365 Group, which is not correct.
cfiessinger and Kady Dundas There is still massive confusion about this :)
Imran Masud - Thanks that was helpful, and .... I have been creating groups using the new Unified Group commandlet in powershell. This is provisioning an O365 Group right? Is there a way to create an O365 Group that is NOT surfaced in Outlook? In other words, I would like an O365 Group with an instance of MS Teams but I do not want it to display in OWA or the Outlook client. Thanks - Greg
No, when you create a Team, you create an Office 365 Group. You can hide the group from appearing in the Exchange address lists afterwards with PowerShell by running Set-UnifiedGroup -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $True cmdlet, but the group will be there and the Exchange mailbox exists to host a) the team calendar and b) compliance records captured from conversations in the channels belonging to the team.
TonyRedmond - Thanks - When I create a new Team, I have the option of using a O365 Group that I am an owner of. Will the Teams client 'see' the O365 Group if I set -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $True, in other words do I need to run this after I create the Team from my O365 Group?
It seems to me that this commandlet should be run every time you create a O365 group for the express purpose of associating it with a team. Do you recommend this?
- David Rosenthal
Microsoft
I would not recommend hiding all like that as there are still a number of scenarios where you might want people to be able to find that mailbox. As one single example, the mailbox could be how people external to the Group communicate with said Group as they would not be able to participate in Teams unless they were made a member.
- An external user shouldn't have to worry about communicating with a Group as all they need is the SMTP address to send email to be able to participate in conversations. They will need the URL of the team site to access documents, which they don't get from any address list. As to external access to Teams, we still do not know how this mechanism will work (I have written on the topic at https://www.petri.com/common-external-access-office-365), but I can't see how a group hidden from an Exchange address list will have problems with external access. After all, you don't share address lists with external users and in fact, external access to groups is limited today in terms of what an external user can see, But, arguing against myself, this doesn't mean that you can simply hide all groups and expect Teams to work without an issue. Testing against multiple scenarios is needed to understand exactly what works and what does not.
Well, the hidden from address lists property is really for Exchange rather than Teams. I have been able to use Teams whose Group is hidden from the address lists, but I have not done extensive testing...