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Manage automatic creation of direct reports group
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-help-8387f129-19cc-4426-9911-e36fa0a01043?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
THANK 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-group-in-Outlook-MC96611/m-p/55318#M2740
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?
- cfiessinger
Microsoft
Greg this only applies to customers who have been notified via MC94808, please see this https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Update-Auto-creation-of-Direct-Reports-group-in-Outlook-MC96611/m-p/56384#M2802 - BenSchorr
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.
Thanks. Is there a way to easily create such a group manually or does it have to be a normal group creation process?
- cfiessinger
THANK 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-group-in-Outlook-MC96611/m-p/55318#M2740
Teams for Education. All is forgiven :-)
- :-) Yeap!
Things like this make me check the O365 Message Center/Centre regularly...that's good right :-)
The best thing about this new feature,...is that it is easily disabled. Obv better if disabled by default or at least had a big countdown somewhere on the Admin page to remind people to disable.
Someone somewhere is no doubt very happy that this feature is coming.... Emphasis on the one.
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.
Can someone please explain what will happen for a automated group where the manager leave the company, also whant will happen when a replacement of the manager is assigned with the direct reports.
Thanks in advance.
- cfiessingerThe content stays behind, the replacement will have access to all the content https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Assign-a-new-owner-to-an-orphaned-group-86bb3db6-8857-45d1-95c8-f6d540e45732
Carlos Gomez wrote:Can someone please explain what will happen for a automated group where the manager leave the company, also whant will happen when a replacement of the manager is assigned with the direct reports.
Thanks in advance.
It's answered earlier in the thread, but the thread is getting long and fragmented.
Basically, it will be a manual process (rename/re-assign existing group, or create new group and move members to new group), from what I've understood of the replies from Microsoft so far.
Thanks Paul Cunningham,
I'll take a note on this, but would be nice if Microsoft updates their documentation to add this case scenario at least for the ones that do not read this thread.
Regards.
This is a very good question Carlos Gomez I would also like to know the answer... cfiessinger can you help here?
Yikes what a nightmare:
Beginning in April 2017, managers who have 2-20 direct reports, do not already have a direct reports group, and have permissions to create groups in Outlook, will automatically have a private group created for them with their direct reports. The manager will be added as an owner, and the direct reports of the manager will be added as members by default. The group will be named "<Manager's Name>'s direct reports", but that can be edited.
And also all the governance with quitting, new members etc. If there's one roll out which should have been opt-in, it's this one. Are Microsoft trying to bump adoption numbers somehow with this plethora of auto creation of groups? I know we will inform our customers about this and make sure they do the needed Posh.
First of all, Kudos is deserved cfiessinger for making this change known via the message center in a timely manner, and making sure people know how to opt-out. And while some of you have pointed out that not all admins read the message center, Microsoft is in a tough spot finding a way to effectively communicate to everyone (if you have figured out how to do it in your company, please share!).
I also assume the logic behind this change is to drive adoption. Again, I can see the logic behind those thoughts since we also struggle with getting our internal users to understand all of the tools available in O365. If you can lead them to water by creating Groups for them, then perhaps they'll take a drink (and drive adoption which is probably how the PG gets compensated$)
But we'll be turning this auto-creation off. Too many things that can go wrong with this that outweigh the possible rewards. And from a bigger picture, this is so close timewise to the launch of Teams where people in our company are already asking if we should create a Team from every Team/Group.
Since we are in the process of rolling out Office 365, we have turned off Group creation by staff until we get some educational/policy work done. If we do turn on Group creation by staff, I will be disabling this feature. Although it seems like a nice convenient way to auto create groups for managers, many of our managers have their direct reports separated into specific teams they work with. Adding another group for all will just add to the clutter and confusion.
The other factor is maintenance. We already have a tough time monitoring staff changes. This would just add to it unless it's set up to dynamically change when updates are done to AD. Since we don't have AD premium, I am guessing that won't be happening.
Pointless at best, positively disruptive at worst given we still don't have much in the way of tools for managing Groups in the first place. I can think of several things I'd prefer they spent the development time on doing or finishing:-
- Group Soft Delete
- Central IT access to All groups
- Delve Search of private groups
- Dynamic groups for all (not just AAD Premium)
- Some way of navigating from groups to a central site
- Better options for branding
- Full set of SharePoint framework parts
I like Groups but please finish what you have before adding new stuff.
- cfiessinger
1- Coming very soon
2- Please explain, IT can already manage all groups centrally
3- Still working on this
4- good feedback for your MSFT account rep
5- please explain? we are working on a unified groups card across apps.
6-7 good feeback for my SP colleagues
Chris,
2. Refers to that fact that by default only group owners and members of a private group can even see the content, making it difficult to judge if people are using them. You can add yourself as an owner but it takes time to take effect. No part of a computer system should be locked out to the people managing it. Having them not searchable and unrecoverable only adds to them problem.
5. Refers to the fact that Microsoft are pushing groups all the time time but the UI is disjointed to the users. How does someone navigate from a group to a central intranet site etc?
Mike
- turned up yesterday on the roadmap and the message center. I've immediately made a mental note to disable this today. DONE
Might be a good idea in theory, possibly for fresh tenants, but boy would this mess up my currently very clear organization of groups.
I already have department groups that mostly represent hierarchy structures, no need for additional groups.
Also the documentation lacks many scenarios as already described above.Agree with Ivan and others. Organizational opt-in makes more sense. However, i think I understand the drivers: Most managers will likely create a similar group on their own, and those who don't already have one (one of the conditions of this automation) are missing out on a key collaborative tool. I would venture that the majority of people to whom this would apply are not as engaged -- and Microsoft views this new feature as an engagement tool designed to nudge them in the right direction.
Whether opt-in or opt-out, you still have the ability to rename or remove the direct reports group. What the automation can't do for us is add any dotted-line reports or supporting personnel who may not formally report to a manager, but who are part of the functional team. So regardless of the provisioning process, managers should review and modify, as needed.
I agree that many managers will want groups like this. But would someone name their group "my direct reports?" I would hope that the name would be aligned with what the group does, not who currently at this moment in time happens to be the designated "manager." What happens when the "manager" leaves the organization but the team still exists? What if they forget to make a new owner for the group? Do the O365 Admins have the time to manage and govern all this? What happens when the manager changes jobs and now has new direct reports at the same company? How is the poor team member going to know where to store content when they are still getting the hang of OneDrive vs. team sites? There are just so many use cases where automatic creation of "direct report" groups doesn't make sense. It would be great if a manager could specify the creation of a group that includes her or his direct reports as part of Group provisioning and then configure it to include who else should be in it and name it at the time of creation, not after the fact. I agree with everyone suggesting this should be opt-in or one click to turn it off. It's very scary from a governance perspective!
Surprised to see this appear in my (and my customers') Message Center. At first blush this does seem like a very poor idea.
What if the manager already has a DL for their reports that they're happy with? They get a Group created anyway?
What if the manager already has a Group, or a Team that is being actively used? They get Yet Another Group created anyway?
Will the Group membership be auto-adjusted over time? Nothing indicates that it will.
If an auto-created Group is deleted, does it get recreated automatically later?
This seems like a semi-useful feature if it was opt-in, so you could carefully set up your reports/manager relationships, turn it on, and have them automatically created and managed. But as an opt-out feature, I am concerned this will mess up the GAL of many organizations, and mess it up quite badly.
- BenSchorrHi Paul,
If the manager already has a group created it shouldn't create another group. Also if the auto-created group gets deleted it shouldn't be automatically recreated later. Group membership is NOT dynamic - so once it's auto-created the manager will have to add/remove members as appropriate.
Hope that helps!"If the manager already has a group created it shouldn't create another group.:
Exchange distribution group or Office 365 Group"? Auto-created Group or manually created Group?
Let's say you've got an IT Ops team, the manager is Jane Tulley, she has 4 direct reports (with relationships already set up in AD), and they have one of the following *already in place*...
1) A distribution group (little g) named "IT Operations" that they use for email communication only. They're happy with this and deliberately have chosen an Exchange distribution group for this purpose (especially now that emails sent to Groups don't get delivered to the sender), and they manage the membership of the Exchange distribution group as needed. With Groups auto-creation, they'll also end up with a "Jane Tulley Direct Reports" Group (big G), and now they have two things to manage the membership of. Or they delete the unneeded Group, which you say won't be recreated. How does it know not to recreate? Can anything trigger re-creation of an auto-created Group, like a change in Manager/Reports relationships?
2) A Group (big G) called "IT Operations" that they use for email comms, Planner, Teams, file storage, OneNote stuff, all the good things that Groups provide, because they've bought into the Groups concept. Does auto-creation still create a "Jane Tulley Direct Reports" Group for them with the exact same members? If so, it has done so for no benefit whatsoever.
This whole conversation would be different if the feature was opt-in and the behavior was communicated more clearly from the outset. We'd be discussing with customers how best to leverage the feature, e.g. by setting up all your Manager/Reports relationships first, letting managers know they'll get this Group to communicate with their direct reports, then flipping the switch to enable auto-creation (PS - a way to phase the roll out of this within your tenant would be helpful, to avoid Help Desk overwhelm when hundreds/thousands of Groups suddenly appear).
But as Vasil has already mentioned, the value of this feature is diminished by the lack of dynamic membership. For the average Joe Bloggs or Jane Doe, having a Group of their direct reports that they can easily send email to is a nice thing to have, but having to maintain membership is a pain. That's the sort of thing they expect technology to solve for them, e.g. by having the Manager/Reports relationships all set up properly and maintained by IT or a HR system ongoing.
cfiessinger can you confirm my thinking on something here... when it states "automatic group creation"...we are talking about an Office 365 Group (I've seen this stated as "connected group"). So this isn't just a Group in Outlook (a distribution list on steriods)? This is a fully fledged security group, distribution list, plus you'll get a OneDrive for Business folder, SharePoint site, Yammer group, Planner plan etc. etc. provisioned as well? This seems like a lot of moving parts that may not get used and sit stale and most likely be innaccurate membership.
Obviously this isn't that big of a concern I think. At hyperfish we're seeing that most organizations don't have the manager field populated for users, around 40% of users we've analyzed do. We can clearly help with completing and ensuring up-to-date manager fields.
Yeah...most of the organisations I work with have poor implementations of ManagedBy, so I guess I'll scoot around and turn this off for now!
What's next - Groups for Country and Groups for Office and Groups for Department? That'll be great when "HR" and "Human Resources" and "HR/Payroll" get different Groups created.
First time I'm aware of this feature cfiessinger TonyRedmond any comments?
- It was posted today in Message Center.
I haven't seen this feature. It might not yet have been deployed. It might also be a feature designed for small tenants.
I do not think this is a good idea for large to enterprise tenants. In fact, it is a rotten idea. Enterprise tenants like to control their GAL and this sounds like a way to clutter that GAL up with a profusion of groups that will quickly become an uncontrollable mess. Unless, of course, Microsoft is going to update the newly-created groups on an ongoing basis to adjust membership based on changing reporting relationships. Creating groups is easy; maintaining them over time is bloody hard. That's why many enterprises have their own solutions (often integrated with HR processes) to do this kind of thing. It is a special challenge when organizations do not populate AAD with reporting relationships - or keep this data current, a problem that is more prevalent than you might think.
It's an example of a bright idea that looked good on a whiteboard but might be horrible in the field.
Now I look forward to be proven wrong by the disclosure of a super-competenent system for tracking reporting relationships across large organizations and behind-the-scenes automatic adjustment of group memberships, removal of unwanted groups, and so on.
After thinking about this plan for several days, I conclude that it is flawed and will cause more bother than it is worth. I confirmed my feeling that few companies have the necessary accuracy in AAD to make this worthwhile by asking Cogmotive to run a query against their dataset of Office 365 mailboxes. Without compromising user confidentially in any way, they discovered that only 45% of the mailboxes they record for reporting purposes have the necessary ManagedBy property in place. This is a plan that works for companies that pay attention to AAD, but not for others.
I also have huge doubt about the way that Microsoft is using customer data to generate new objects for the GAL. That seems dubious under EU data protection guidelines.
In any case, here's the article:
Microsoft plans to auto-generate Office 365 Groups for managers to enable them to collaborate better with employees. Sounds good, until you realize that the reporting relationships stored in Azure Active Directory drive the process. And we all know how reliable that information really is.
https://www.petri.com/microsoft-auto-generate-office-365-groups
