Forum Discussion
Where to create an Office 365 group?
When creating the group through AzureAD, the alias is pretty much a guid@domain.com.
Hi Ivan
Creating an Office 365 Group through Teams doesn't allow you to edit the alias of the group today. This is because the expectation is that users who create groups in Teams tend to work in Teams instead of Outlook, so showing Outlook relevant properties like email address would make little sense.
I would say this would be OK if teams existing in isolation, but the big selling point for Microsoft is not the quality of the software, but rather the scope of the platform; the integration with all of the office software. While I agree Teams users should not really be bothered with email settings for setting up a chat based team, that's not really what they are setting up. They are setting up an Office 365 Group which is a massive concept that has interplay with almost every other service Microsoft has available. So whether they know it or not they are getting a SharePoint team site, a "shared mailbox", a planner plan etc.
If a company has defined customizations to each of these services that greatly enhances (and enables) their use towards a company goal, then we need to be able to deploy these customization when appropriate.Someone making a "team" call it "Project A" for a project that will only really use MS Teams, might be on another team (Group) "Project B" that was created in and primarily uses SharePoint. This person also uses outlook for communication because email isn't going anywhere.
The end result:
While this user is on SharePoint, they see their nice "Project B" site, but also this bare-bones, mostly useless other than for file sharing, "Project A" site that was auto-provisioned without any business process integrations.
While this user is in outlook they see their normal inbox, along with these "Group" inboxes that were auto-provisioned, potentially garbage, mail-addresses under "Groups".I am all for empowering users to initiate their collaboration environment. However, there needs to be a way to customize what that environment is at a global level. I want employees to be able to spin up SharePoint sites, Teams, Plans, etc but I want it to incorporate the tools and structure that make those environments useful within the context of our business (powerapps, flow, powerbi, sharepoint lists/documents/templates/teams bots the list goes on!!!).
The scope of Office Groups is too big to treat so carelessly.
Hi Myles
Thanks for this detailed feedback. We've been cognizant of this exact same problem and are looking to actively solve it in the coming fiscal year. Controlling what resources get provisioned when you create a group from any of the Office 365 apps is on our priority list. However, this is an extremely hard engineering problem to solve so it might take a while.
- True for endusers, not quite correct for managed environments (aka SMB) where administrators still have control of what gets created and how it is named.
- cfiessinger
Microsoft
Being able to edit the SMTP address is something we are working on, with a ETA in the summer, please stay tune.
