Forum Discussion
Private Teams visible in Global Address List (GAL) – Seeking clarification on expected behavior
Hello Microsoft 365 Team,
We are an ISV that develops a Microsoft Teams-integrated solution used across multiple customer tenants, and we have encountered a privacy and security concern regarding the visibility of private teams in the Global Address List (GAL).
Issue
Private teams are expected to remain private and undiscoverable. However, we have found that in some tenants, private teams are visible in Outlook and the GAL by default.
Microsoft Support initially indicated that private teams should be hidden by default and that a fix was in progress.
More recently, Microsoft Support has stated that this behavior is "by design," but we have not been able to find any official documentation confirming this.
Seeking Microsoft’s guidance
We would greatly appreciate clarification on the following:
- What is the expected behavior for private teams and GAL visibility?
- Is there an official Microsoft document that confirms whether private teams should be visible or hidden by default?
- If private teams should be visible by default, is there a roadmap update that will allow admins to configure this more easily?
- Has this behavior been reviewed by Microsoft’s Security & Compliance teams as a privacy concern
Why this is important
As an ISV, we develop solutions that integrate with Microsoft 365 and need to provide accurate guidance to our customers.
Some customers have security & compliance requirements that depend on private teams being fully private.
Understanding whether this is a recent change, a misconfiguration, or the expected behavior will allow us to implement appropriate solutions for our customers.
If this issue has been raised internally, we would appreciate any insights from Microsoft’s product or engineering teams. I am tagging Jeff Teper Alym Rayani and Karuana_Gatimu_MSFT in case they can provide clarification.
We appreciate any guidance you can provide on this issue and look forward to your response.
Best regards,
Anne Hegle Jespersen
Founder & COO, ONwork
2 Replies
If you create a group, there should also be an option for hiding the group from the GAL.
If I am not mistaken..🤔
If you make a new group and add that option. Does it still show in the GAL?Hi Danielle,
Yes, there is an option for hiding the group from GAL after it has been created. However, this must be done for every private group.
We were hoping that private groups would be hidden by default, as this is expected by our customers, but we understand that for some industries, this feature is wanted and needed.
So we will build into our code instead that private groups are hidden by default in GAL for teams considered strictly confidential.
