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Ayaz Younis's avatar
Ayaz Younis
Brass Contributor
Sep 24, 2018
Solved

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.

  • 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).
  • Ayaz Younis's avatar
    Ayaz Younis
    Brass Contributor

    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.

    • SamGray's avatar
      SamGray
      Copper Contributor

      Thomas Binder 

      Classic case of "software provider thinks they know best" 🥴

      Education is great, sometimes it doesn't work and user privileges are a better safeguard. We don't have time to be constantly educating people on what is not best practice and fixing up the issues caused by software that has dumb flaws in design.

      Imagine saying "oh no, there's no need to have private folders.. just educate people not to go into the folders they shouldn't". Absolutely ludicrous.

      It's "in case there is" by the way, not their.

      • Aimology's avatar
        Aimology
        Copper Contributor

        Donnie Ewers   anyone who thinks educating users instead of limiting access this has know clue how to manage a IT department.

        organizing and having a structure that is clean for SharePoint is extremely important and this is a huge deal regardless of educating users or not. 

        its the equivalent to allowing anyone make distribution groups and when you grow in size, you have hundreds of useless teams groups made for 1,2,3 users that end up being used for a few weeks, days, or not touched for years

        then you have to clean up a mess of stuff. this recommendation of just "educating" users is beyond stupid.

    • Stephen_Davies's avatar
      Stephen_Davies
      Copper Contributor

      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.

  • Scott Schwarze's avatar
    Scott Schwarze
    Copper Contributor

    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

     

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