Mar 16 2017 12:19 PM
Please let me know what you think:
To view the complete article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-automatic-creation-of-direct-reports-group-Admin-hel...
Mar 21 2017 03:01 PM
@Ben Schorr wrote:
He may have been referring to the fact that at launch this feature is only enabled for tenants with less than 50K mailboxes.
Which for many countries mean most tenants ;) Still good to know.
-m
Mar 21 2017 03:39 PM
Yeah we will be turning this off as well, I can see it creating more headaches than helping. We allow our users to create groups when needed, but auto creation of groups is a no go. This really should have been an opt in, not an opt out rollout.
Mar 21 2017 04:21 PM - edited Mar 21 2017 04:24 PM
SolutionTHANK YOU all for your feedback, please see an update in this new thread: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Update-Auto-creation-of-Direct-Reports-grou...
Mar 21 2017 04:34 PM
@David Rosenthal wrote:We all signed up for stuff like this when we embraced Office 365.
Not really. We signed up for a service that grows and evolves, but we didn't sign up for Microsoft to make changes to our data (and throwing a bunch of objects into our GAL automatically is a change to our data).
Sure, we signed up so that things like Groups, Planner, or Teams get added to the service whether we asked for them or not, and it's acceptable to just go with the flow when admin portals change, PS modules get replaced, intelligent editor features get added to Word, etc.
But we didn't sign up for Microsoft to automatically create everybody a personal Planner plan, or ever team a Team, or inject an un-deletable Archive folder into every mailbox, or create every manager a Group as in this case.
Mar 21 2017 05:00 PM
Yep, I get it, and probably why Microsoft is stepping back on this. They overstepped a bit, we all barked, and now they are rethinking. That is considerably better than the "old" Microsoft I would say.
There is a positive hidden inside all this negative in this thread is all I'm saying.
Mar 22 2017 05:18 PM
Teams for Education. All is forgiven :)
Mar 26 2017 05:23 AM
As an FYI - I submitted the following user voice which I think really speaks to the core of this issue. I believe that tenant admins should have the ability to decide how they are going to consume Office 365 and whether or not features are enabled/disabled by default.
Mar 26 2017 09:53 AM
I like the general idea @Jared Matfess but I fear this would cause a significant slowdown in innovation and the introduction of new features and products within Office 365.
Default on solves two important items for Microsoft:
Believe me though, I understand the concerns as my own org struggles with these types of things on occasion.
A compromise I think I could get behind would include two things:
This would allow things to be turned off easily if desired, but forces attention and understanding of new things coming. A switch to turn all new things off by default would just reinforce lazy Global Admin behavior and allow them to ignore new things completely and sit happily in their silo maintaining status quo.
Probably somewhat controversial, but if status quo is really what you are looking for or is required by some sort of ultra strict regulations, Office 365 may not be the best home for you. Those with these conditions should have stayed on-prem. People seem to forget that Office 365 is a SaaS offering that changes rapidly. This is not an IaaS lift and shift.
Mar 26 2017 10:15 AM
I don't think anyone minds innovation and new products showing up. What they do mind is when changes are introduced in a manner that compromises their data (like new objects in the GAL) without their say-so. An opt-in arrangement would have satisfied a lot of the issues here. Being able to control new features through the GUI is also a reasonable ask, but I fear that the speed of the cloud means that some things will just have to be managed through PowerShell, especially when they are one-off operations like turning a feature on or off.
As to the grumpy community members (I am a proud member of this band), one of the reasons for grumpiness is when you see the same mistake being made time after time. Microsoft did not socialize this change sufficiently well to understand the consequences of going ahead. I believe that this is understood. I just hope that we don't have to have another outburst of grumpiness when the same mistake is made again.
TR
Mar 26 2017 04:49 PM
Appreciate the response @David Rosenthal.
I do like your compromise of being able to enable/disable all features with the UI - that should honestly be a no-brainer.
What I'm struggling with is two of your comments:
1) Your comment on usage data (basically their telemetry). Sure they have the ability to measure but I find that this automated data collection method misses simple user experience issues such as not being able to quickly grab a URL for a Document within the Modern Library experience. The "grumpy community" folks still need to bang their drums to get folks on the product team engaged and responding to poor user experiences.
2) The comment about this not being lift & shift and organizations that have tough requirements should remain on-premises. Let's think about the current enterprise landscape - if you're a company of decent size, then you have dedicated Microsoft account representatives managing your relationship. Their incentives are 100% on pushing customer to consume cloud services - Azure & O365. Every month these sales staff are not only pushing cloud, but they're even helping to develop the business cases to help push their customers along. Nobody is talking about what it's really like being in the cloud and consuming Office 365 - the focus is all on the benefits and not some of the realities such as features getting pushed. There should also be some level of choice for automatically opting out of changes if you know that you have an organization that requires additional handholding. I would also add that Microsoft's new process of releasing "MVP" (minimally viable product) and then fixing a few weeks/months later creates even additional overhead of trying to support a premature product.
There's honestly Pro's & Con's for both keeping it the same vs changing, I just happen to be more in favor of giving paying customers choice vs forcing change.
Great discussion though!
Mar 27 2017 06:50 AM
The telemetry is getting pretty good these days. I think with modern ML techniques it should not be that hard to spot a "lost" user based on their previous and next actions. It is time to apply the "AI" that Satya champions so much.
That being said, I agree that the community aspect is important to point out the "Really?!?" type things, like the original issue that started this whole thread. Let's not forget that Microsoft did step back on this feature to re-evaluate after considerable pushback. Where I have issue with some of the "grumpy" community is the language used sometimes. Go back and read this thread and it feels like Microsoft is committing war crimes. "This is one of the worst ideas I've seen come out of Redmond for years, if not ever. And that's saying something." Is that really necessary? Do we think that whatever PM was in charge of this feature is going to want to engage with a community that says things like that about them? Taking a stance like that makes them engage because they have to, not because they want to.
There are people behind these features. Some more practiced than others, and some who need our guidance a lot more than others. I think we've all, myself included, spent too much time combating internet trolls and it has changed our default language for the worse.
To help show a positive, go check out this great article that @Rahul Kayala just published on Medium: https://twitter.com/RahulKayala/status/846236286998331392 Rahul is a PM on Microsoft Teams and does as great a job thinking about and probing actual usage as he can. Behavior like that should be celebrated and multiplied as much as possible.
As for the lift and shift stuff, I challenge my Microsoft account team pretty hard quite often. Too often I see people treat them with kid gloves because "They're Microsoft" but I certainly don't. I have small business ownership and sales in my background, and turning difficult clients into good relationships is part of the job description. No different for sales/account people at Microsoft. I think they actually dread emails from me because they know I'm not going to settle for sales and marketing fluff and they'll actually have to get me some answers or I'm going to go around them to the respective PG I'm interested in. I think these account teams are the last remnants of the Ballmer era whose time for change will come. The "selling seats" model needs to die IMO. It is time these people get incentives for selling the best solution that fits the business need as measured by adoption, engagement, and customer satisfaction. Do that well and the seats and revenue come automatically.
Mar 27 2017 08:42 AM
I didn't see anything in this forum that I thought was over-the-top commentary on this topic. If anything, it was measured compared to some of the expressions I saw elsewhere, including those shared privately with Microsoft. No one insulted anyone's mother or cast aspirations about the circumstances of their birth. No one said that the individuals behind this decision had brown smelly bovine emissions for brains. It was all in good taste. Healthy debate is fine as long as it stays within acceptable boundaries... and the Microsoft PMs that I have met have seldom been shy, retiring types who cannot accept criticism. The good ones (and I have met many over the last 25 years) take criticism of products as part of the ebb and flow of development.
I accept that decisions are taken in the best spirit possible. However, two things get in the way of some of the decisions that we have seen inside Office 365. First, (as in this case) an unreasonable assumption that Office 365 tenants use AAD in the same way that Microsoft does. We don't. Second, a rush to move people to use Office 365 Groups that is sometimes over the top.
Telemetry often guides decisions and it is very useful in terms of user features. But this is not a user feature. It's something that goes to the heart of organizational structure within companies and it affects the view that people have of that structure. The telemetry failed in terms of telling Microsoft how people use AAD and it cannot tell Microsoft how people use Office 365 for business purposes. The old adage that even the most skilled and experienced consultant only has 50% of the solution holds true here. The 50% controlled by Microsoft (the code and the ability to flight it to tenants) is perfectly good. The other 50%, which is the context in which companies run Office 365 to assist them in business operations, was lost. Understanding context is extraordinarily difficult, but that's the trick that turns ideas that are potentially good into ideas that are absolutely brilliant.
TR
Mar 29 2017 08:38 PM
So our tenant organisational config says this is enabled although the number of mailboxes is way more than 50,000. I don't see any direct report groups created for any users so is it something that is coming or not working because we have too many users?
Mar 30 2017 09:28 AM
@Greg Lamb wrote:
So our tenant organisational config says this is enabled although the number of mailboxes is way more than 50,000. I don't see any direct report groups created for any users so is it something that is coming or not working because we have too many users?
It's being rolled out to a very limited number of customers currently and not to any with more than 50,000 mailboxes.
Mar 30 2017 10:47 AM
Mar 30 2017 06:00 PM
Thanks. Is there a way to easily create such a group manually or does it have to be a normal group creation process?
Mar 31 2017 09:15 AM
It would be a normal group creation process, though if you happen to have an existing distribution list that has the correct membership you might be able to migrate it. See this article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Migrate-distribution-lists-to-Office-365-Groups-Admin-help-...
Apr 06 2017 09:17 AM
I was really fortunate to have Christophe on the Hyperfish Podcast which was published today talking about this topic. Would highly recommend it for those interested in the discussion that happened in this thread.
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Apr 19 2017 04:56 AM
I got around to listen to the interview you had with @Christophe Fiessinger and I do get the points about giving new managers a collaboration group to handle their team.
From a document management perspective however, having a group for the team where the owner changes if the manager is switched out makes more sense. This of course requires procedures to switch out owners/members when you change position.
So, I'd rather try to fix the procedure to automagically make sure people are members of a Group set in some org/project structure - instead of letting the manager be the boss. Which leads to: if you indeed has this in place, the auto-groups would never be provisioned in the first place :)
Ideally a new Group would be autoprovisioned based on the rules set in the support article, but the name/e-mail would not be tied to the manager by name, but to the manager by position/role (if possible at all). I think this actually might be the real issue. Then, if you switch out the manager, the old one onboards the new one in the existing group.