Prevent Users from Upgrading Distribution lists to Office 365 Groups

Hi Shilpa,

Thank you for responding to me. I am pleased to note that users cannot upgrade groups if they do not have the create group option enabled.

However, please allow me to comment on a few other points raised in your reply that i have real concerns with:

1:  We are currently in the process of rolling out a way for tenants to disable allowing DL owners the capability to upgrade their owned DLs to groups.

This should have been put in place before the feature was ever released! Allowing people to just make changes without the tenant administrators being able to prevent it is just not acceptable!

2:  We understand that not all DLs need to be upgraded to Groups. DL owners are the ones who are best to make the decision on which DLs would be better served by upgrading to Groups as such we have offered this feature.

NOOOO!!!!!!! DL owners are not the ones who are best to make this decision!!! DL Administrators are! There are many things about Office 365 groups which are good, but there are many i have real issues with!

I have given members of the local/regional IT administrators groups in the various countries we operate in, the ability to control the address lists that people in their country use. They, along with me, are all listed as Owners on those lists. Unlike Distribution Lists, Owners in Office 365 Groups have to be members as well, so i categorically do not want people promoting lists to groups where i find i have suddenly become a member of a group and therefore get included in all the email chains and group subscriptions, nor do the administrators want the surge in unnecessary email either! I also don't want to have to remove them from the group as they are not administrators in Office 365 and so would lose the ability to add/remove members! We have processes and procedures in place for changes and every time Microsoft release a new update, we have to spend ages going around fixing it to allow the existing procedures to work, it is really frustrating! Sure, make new things available, but ensure the controls are there for controlling it first and do not just switch it on for all users! And most importantly, spend time making the existing features work more in harmony with governance and control first!

Anyway, thank you for your comments and although i doubt my reply will make a difference (i've said much of this before to others at Microsoft in the past as well), i feel it needs to be said.

Regards

Jon