Forum Discussion
Turn off ability to create teams
Hi all,
From a safeguarding and child protection point of view, in a school environment, it is not appropriate to allow students or staff to create new teams. Can the ability to disable team creation please be added?
Unfortunately the powershell options to disable teams/O365 groups requires you to have Azure AD Premium, which many peopl including ourselves do not have. The UI option in Azure AD to stop users creating security/O365 groups, even when set to No, does not work.
Students are still able to create Teams, and the fear is that this could be used for bullying purposes. Our senior child protection officer will not allow Teams to be sued until the ability to stop users from creating Teams is turned off. Only admins should be able to create Teams/O365 groups.
Feel free to add weight to uservoice - https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/35505892-disable-team-creation
Thanks.
We also have had a A1 plan with Azure Basic which should be included. It is difficult to setup the process but it should be supported to disable this feature.
Disable Teams: http://macslui.blogspot.com/2017/11/disable-self-service-teams-creation.html
Manage 365 Groups: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-who-can-create-Office-365-Groups-4c46c8cb-17d0-44b5-9776-005fced8e618
In addition persons can create Distribution List if that feature is available to users if you have not secure it.
http://msweany.blogspot.com/2014/06/office365-remove-users-create-dist-list.html
We also have had a A1 plan with Azure Basic which should be included. It is difficult to setup the process but it should be supported to disable this feature.
Disable Teams: http://macslui.blogspot.com/2017/11/disable-self-service-teams-creation.html
Manage 365 Groups: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-who-can-create-Office-365-Groups-4c46c8cb-17d0-44b5-9776-005fced8e618
In addition persons can create Distribution List if that feature is available to users if you have not secure it.
http://msweany.blogspot.com/2014/06/office365-remove-users-create-dist-list.html
Adding group creation restriction does require Azure AD Premium for anyone included in the group you assign to be able to create groups / teams
From what I understand you can easily create the group creation restriction policy without being assigned the appropriate Azure AD Premium licences, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a requirement to be compliant?
"Doing the steps in this article requires a subscription to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Premium. The administrator who configures the settings, and the members of the affected groups, must have Azure AD Premium licenses assigned to them"
- Thanks Scott. I tried it and it worked. Many thanks.
- Thomas Binder
Microsoft
We do not recommend to disable people from creating Teams as it takes away a lot of the value that Teams provide. Instead we would recommend to double down of user education -- and make users aware that the admin can see who created certain Team in case their is an inappropriate Team being created.
More information: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/plan-teams-governance-edu
Thomas Binder seriously!
Ever heard of an IT department trying to manage a SharePoint site and keeping it organised and tidy. We have people creating teams constantly - even after education. The teams sites are never setup correctly, they are never attached to the hub site (they cant do that unless they are an admin anyway), never added to the sharepoint Teams links page on our intranet.
Further as a growing business it requires constant education of new staff to want to use it because they see it available. One person created a team site for his personal files!!
Why is it so hard to give the OPTION for the site administrators to control who can create teams. IF they want to allow freedom - great let them have it, but most corporate business want to control how their Intranet and sharepoint sites are structured.Thomas BinderI think you missing the point if i'm honest from a Educational perspective.
- Thanks for the comments guys, really appreciate it.
Thomas, whilst I agree in principle, educating the kids to behave is the way forward. But our concern is not really kids messing about and creating random groups, its teams that are created for the purpose of bullying. We take a zero tolerance approach on bullying and abuse and it would be seen as very bad if we were the ones facilitating this abuse. Also, it becomes very time intensive trawling through many groups, trying to ascertain which is genuine and which isnt.
Scott and Christopher thanks for your help.
Im just wondering which is the better option or what the difference is between them?
We have an on premises Exchange, we use 365 for SharePoint, Teams, etc. only.
- Hi, I can briefly share, how we do it (we have an organization where after final migration approx. 155.000 users are active, so we govern Teams). We have created a group in Azure. This group was given the right to create groups. The creation itself however is done via our SW Portal, people fill out a short request form, we approve or decline and then a team in the backgroud utilizes Graph API for the creation, however Teams Part on top of Group still is done manually (until the API is GA, so soon this manual part will vanish).
