Manage automatic creation of direct reports group

Thanks.  Is there a way to easily create such a group manually or does it have to be a normal group creation process?

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.

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.

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

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! 

BenSchorr

"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. 

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