SOLVED

Hide Groups membership not working / available?

MVP

Hi all,

It seems that the hide membership option we had for Office 365 Groups is not working / available: http://www.michev.info/Blog/Post/1314/you-can-now-hide-group-membership-for-modern-groups-in-office-... any idea? cc @Vasil Michev @Tony Redmond

20 Replies

We discussed this at Ignite and at that time we said that hidden group membership does work but it's imperfect - the group has to be private, etc.  That's logical when you think of it because there's no point in having a public group with hidden members. I think a couple of other flaws were in the mix too that Microsoft was looking at fixing too.

Thanks Tony, but what I have seen is that the parameter for hiding group members is not there anymore and neither in the documentation.

So it is... How strange! I shall ask.

And at always, this issue appeared because a customer question...here you are the TechNet Article for Set-UnifiedGroup https://technet.microsoft.com/es-es/library/mt238274(v=exchg.160).aspx you will find that the paramenter (HiddenGroupMembershipEnabled) is not there

Interesting, on the EN page for Set-UnifiedGroup it lists it but with a description of "This parameter is reserved for internal Microsoft use." 

 

hiddeng.png

 

I also no longer see it available in my tenant.  I would guess this aligns with the upcoming 

 

Could very well be...

I can confirm the parameter is gone for me too. Or maybe the whole hidden group membership story is just a thing I made up and made you believe :p

Thanks Drew,
Great finding...I hope also Tony will have some news :)
I believe in Vasil :)
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

I asked the question and here's the situation.

 

If you want to hide the membership of a group, use PowerShell to create the group and specify the HiddenGroupMembershipEnabled switch as the New-UnifiedGroup cmdlet still supports it. However, because Set-UnifiedGroup does not (it will again in the future), you cannot change the hidden membership status again. That is, until Microsoft updates Set-UnifiedGroup...

Thanks Tony!

Yeap, thanks for the udpate Tony :)

I ran the following command and was still able to see the group members:

New-UnifiedGroup -DisplayName "Company All" -HiddenGroupMembershipEnabled:$true -Alias Company.All -PrimarySmtpAddress "Company@gitbit.org" -Name "Company All" -ConvertClosedDlToPrivateGroup

 

Maybe I missed a parameter but it didn't work for me.

 

I ended up creating a dynamic distribution group and hiding the actual distribution group:

  1. Create a new dynamic distribution group with a rule set for custom attribute 1 with a unique value of 'company'.
  2. On the distribution group (which contains the members I wish to hide), set the custom attribute 1 value to 'company'. Then hide the distribution group.

The user's can then send to the new dynamic distribution group.

 

 

I just created a new group with PowerShell and set the parameter... But I also set the group to be Private.

 

TopSecret.jpg

I suspect that the access type is the key because if you attempt to set the group to public, you get an error saying that a group with hidden membership must be private. 

 

Did you really use the parameters that you quoted? I just tried them and PowerShell flagged a "property set cannot be resolved using the specified named parameters" error. 

Sorry I must have copied the wrong command. I just ran the following command:

New-UnifiedGroup -DisplayName "dev01" -Alias dev01 -HiddenGroupMembershipEnabled -AccessType Private

 

The list can be expanded in Outlook. I'm not worried about it. We created dynamic groups.

 

Thanks!

John,

 

Did you check with the account who created the group or an account that is not a member of the group?

 

Group members can see the membership. The account that creates a group is automatically a member and can therefore see the membership. People who are not a member cannot.


Dynamic groups cost extra because they need AAD premium licenses. Hence the reason why people like to avoid this feature. https://www.petri.com/microsoft-clarifies-premium-features-office-365-groups 

@Tony Redmond I have an existing group and I would like to unhide memberships for the group. Do you think this is something possible existing groups?

No. @AhmadSameem 

 

Once a group membership is hidden, it can't be unhidden. You need to recreate the group.

 

https://office365itpros.com/2022/10/04/hidden-membership-groups/

@Tony Redmond Another quick questions. Can we hide membership for security groups?

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

I asked the question and here's the situation.

 

If you want to hide the membership of a group, use PowerShell to create the group and specify the HiddenGroupMembershipEnabled switch as the New-UnifiedGroup cmdlet still supports it. However, because Set-UnifiedGroup does not (it will again in the future), you cannot change the hidden membership status again. That is, until Microsoft updates Set-UnifiedGroup...

View solution in original post