Manage automatic creation of direct reports group

[Scott Johnson]

Please let me know what you think:

• "Beginning in March 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."

To view the complete article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-automatic-creation-of-direct-reports-group-Admin-hel...

[#2]

"We have decided to go with the approach of non dynamic membership, because we find that many teams include admins, external members, vendors, etc., who are not necessarily part of the reporting chain. We wanted to allow group owners to flexibly update the group membership if needed."

@Madhuri Tondepu But how many admins, external members, or vendors would go in a group of direct reports?

If you're going to create a group called "John Doe Direct Reports", then that name seems odd if it turns out to be "John Doe Direct Reports + Some External Vendors and Some IT Admins", doesn't it?

[#3]

The owner of a group has the flexibility to update the group name, description, membership at any point. If they would like to change the name to "John Doe's team" they can do so.

Details on how to make update/delete group can be found in this article.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Automatic-creation-of-Direct-Reports-groups-in-Outlook-f434...

[#4]

Does making these changes update everything about the Group? Last time I checked it only changed the display name, but all the URLs, email address, etc still remain the same. Not the best experience if a new manager came in and you're still emailing to the old manager's name or seeing the old manager's name in all the URLs. Not only does that not look right, it can confuse new users who weren't there when the manager change occurred and don't understand the context 😞

[#5]

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! 

[#6]

How's that going to work? If Jane and Dianne and Michelle (who's an external user) report to Joanna, and Joanna has a group called "the fully sick party squad" with Jane and Dianne and Michelle in it; will there be some magical method of deduction that determine's that it's aligned with the groups that would otherwise be automatically created?

[#7]

This is one of the worst ideas I've seen come out of Redmond for years, if not ever. And that's saying something.

I've NEVER seen an organization with more than a few hundred people where the Active Directory data is even close to useful. Two of the prime things that are almost always wrong are Department and Manager. Manager most often contains the person you originally worked for when you were hired - if it contains anyone. There's a reason why Hyperfish is a fantastic product idea. So I would wager that a HUGE percentage of the Groups which would be gcreated are going to be meaningless.

Managers have all sorts of ways they work with their employees. If they want to use a Group, that's great, but assuming that it's the right answer for every manager who uses Office 365 is ridiculous. If I have two employees who sit right there with me, I'll never use the Group, even if it's a great idea.

Most people who use SharePoint - even after all these years - struggle with where to "put their stuff". This will automatically create Yet Another Location for Stuff which they will need to rationalize against. Again, they may get it and they may not, but if they don't WANT the Group, then why on earth would you create it?

Managers come and go, there are dotted line reporting structueres, etc. There is simply no way that all of the most common scenarios can possibly be covered here. Any decent-sized organization is going to end up with hundreds or thousands of orphaned or useless Groups.

What about all the governance questions? What happens when a Manager leaves? How does the content in a Group get archived or preserved if a position is eliminated? People sometimes have more than one manager - for real. AD has never supported this, and the Group here won't either - at least well.

The list of reasons why this shouldn't happen is incredibly long, and the reasons that make it a good idea are few - assuming there are any. I can only guess that it's yet another instance where someone at Microsoft's bonus is tied to the number of Groups "deployed". Full speed ahead and **bleep** the customers.

[#8]

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@Madhuri Tondepu wrote:

We wanted to allow group owners to flexibly update the group membership if needed.

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That sounds like something that should be a user-selectable option then. A simple toggle for the Group owner to say whether they want it dynamically maintained based on the AD manager/reports relationships, or manually maintained.

Apologies too if this discussion is become fragmented. We're all clearly brainstorming out "what if's" and the way these forums sort replies starts to get a bit confusing.

[#9]

I still haven't quite got my head wrapped around why aren't new features turned off by default and then enabled by admins after they've had time to craft the appropriate communications plan. If that's too tricky why not be able to set your tenant so that new features are either enabled or disabled by default? Why is new functionality being forced?

[#10]

I would've thought it was obvious: Someone at Microsoft has a chunky bonus or KPI tied to Groups adoption - and what better way to make users adopt something than to force it down their throats?

[#11]

This doesnt make sense, how on earth would it know that?

For scenario 1, I created the Group on his behalf. So I don't know how the system would assume that, unless it is looking at all users, and all groups that MIGHT contain all of their direct reports, and assume that is a "Direct Reports" group. Note, there are some non-direct reports in the Group as well.

For Scenario 3, the assumption is we are a few days behind re-assigning Group owner. I'm assuming the job to create Groups runs on a fairly recent schedule. So unless we are on the ball for terminations and moves (which we are always not), I do believe this would create a competing Group.

[#12]

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.

[#13]

I respect what Microsoft is doing here with trying to drive adoption of Groups. I think direct reports is a great use case for Groups, so I get the idea behind it.

I have issues with how it is being implemented though, mainly the non dynamic nature. I've read the reasonings for it in this thread, but remain unconvinced. IT at most organizations already have enough things to maintain; now you're asking them to maintain group memberships or to teach end users to do it themselves.

Here's my main piece though; all of us on here stay updated with these changes. We will turn this on or off as needed. In reality, most admins never read their message center messages and won't see this. Instead, it will roll out for them next month, there will be a crazy period where they try to disable it while end users are confused. No one looks good in this scenario; not the IT team, not Microsoft, and certainly not Groups. Let's not tarnish the name of Groups this way.

We've been told many times (see almost every Ignite slide deck) that Microsoft will listen to our feedback. Well please listen now; hold this change back, at least for now. Not for the people on this thread, but for the ones who won't see this until it's too late.

[#14]

I agree with many points mentioned in this thread. From the engagement in this thread, I believe that it is very clear that Microsoft a struck a nerve here with the community, possibly mostly admins and respective community managers in their organizations. 

I hope they deduct that this feature is not release ready in its current state. When you start to auto populate stuff it gets very tricky, as there is not a "one size fits all" approach for every organization out there, therefore additional customization options are necessary for this work, which simply do not exist yet.

The current documentation and comment like "you can change the displayname later" are just highlighting the stuff that DOES work, but do not the stuff does still NOT work since the very inception of Office 365 Groups, like changing URLs, alias, ... the devil's always in the details 😉

[#15]

This is a very good question  @Carlos Gomez I would also like to know the answer... @cfiessinger can you help here?

[#16]

Or maybe it's because they want to show us many different scenarios about Groups usage and also they are working on something to be able to make a good governance of groups...who knows

[#17]

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.

[#18]

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@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.

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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.

[#19]

Perhaps I'm naive but I don't think this drive is motivated by raw adoption but a means to raise the visibility of Groups to a large customer base. We, in this community, are not representative of the sheer scale of Office 365 deployment. It's that scale that Microsoft's Planning Group is addressing here. That said, as always, this community had given great feedback to Microsoft that needs to be taken on board. What works for an SME is not going to work for a multinational corporate. Quite incidentally, and relatively quietly, the release of the Invite functionality for Groups seems much more useful for users in a larger environment. As a simple start, and stated here many times, is to start with Opt out as default. It is the right thing to do.

[#20]

I agree. I'd really like to have a master switch in our tenant where I can set it so new features like this are off by default. We're a large organization and constantly turning things off is tiresome. We need to control the deployment to our organization -- smoother roll outs will not only make us look better but also Microsoft as well!

[#21]

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