Hide Groups membership not working / available?

[jcgonzalezmartin]

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 @VasilMichev @TonyRedmond

[#2]

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.

[#3]

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

[#4]

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

[#5]

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

[#6]

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

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

Office 365 Groups: hidden membership support entry in the roadmap. 

[#7]

Could very well be...

[#8]

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 😛

[#9]

Thanks Drew,
Great finding...I hope also Tony will have some news 🙂

[#10]

I believe in Vasil 🙂

[#11 · Accepted 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...

[#12]

Thanks Tony!

[#13]

Yeap, thanks for the udpate Tony 🙂

[#14]

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.

[#15]

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

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. 

[#16]

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!

[#17]

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 

[#18]

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

[#19]

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/

[#20]

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