O365 Tidbit - Naming policy for O365 Groups

First published on TECHNET on Mar 06, 2018
Hello All,

Another feature that came across my inbox and I thought I would share with you.

Now customers can use a Group Naming Policy to enforce a consistent naming strategy for Office 365 Groups in their organization. This naming policy can help to identify the function of the Group, membership, geographic region, or Group creator, and can also help categorize Groups in the address book. A Group Naming Policy may also be used to block specific words from being used in Group names and aliases.

A Group Naming Policy will be applied to Groups that are created across all workloads (like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Planner, etc.). This policy is applied to both the Group name and Group alias, and is applied when a user creates a Group and when the Group name or alias is edited for an existing Group.

Prefix-Suffix naming policy:  You can use prefixes or suffixes to define the naming convention of Groups. The prefixes/suffixes can either be fixed strings or user attributes like [Department] that will get substituted based on the user who is creating the group.

For example, if you require that Groups have the naming convention that requires that all Groups start with the department name followed by the City and State. In this example, a user in the Finance department in Los Angeles wants to create a group called Analytics:  (Department name)(end user group name)(City)(State) the end result would be a groups called:  Finance Analytics LA CA

Custom Blocked Words, You can also upload a set of blocked words specific to your organization that would be blocked in Groups created by users. (For example: “CEO, Payroll, HR”).  Please see the Public Content links below for samples of how this impacts Group creation

NOTE: With this release every workload has an impact on the user experience, refer here

Configure the group naming policy for a tenant using Azure AD PowerShell

Before running the below commands Open PowerShell Window with Admin privileges

1. Import and connect to Azure AD Preview module

Import-Module AzureADPreview

Connect-AzureAD

1. Now you can set the prefixes and suffixes. Run the following commands in Azure AD PowerShell:

$Setting["PrefixSuffixNamingRequirement"] = “Grp_[Department]_[GroupName]_[Country]"

1. Now set the custom blocked words that you want to restrict by typing below. Add your own custom words that you want:

$Setting["CustomBlockedWordsList"]=“Payroll,CEO,HR"

Note: You can export multiple words, refer to link  here

1. Save the settings for the new policy to be effective by typing:

Set-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | where -Property DisplayName -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id -DirectorySetting $Setting

Documentation

Docs.microsoft.com

Support.Office.com

General Availability

We are in Public Preview from today and will soon announce the GA date.

Subscription

Group naming policy requires Azure Active Directory Premium P1 license for unique users that are members of Office 365 groups.

Pax