Customising the welcome email sent when a new member is added to a team

[LynnProspect]

When we add new members to an MS Team, they get an automated email message welcoming them to the team. It includes content which is not appropriate for our organisation. In particular, it has a direct link to the Sharepoint site for their Team. We don't want staff to engage with these Sharepoint sites at the moment - we only want them to use the Teams front end. The email footer includes references to Twitter, Trello ad Jira - none of them are appropriate for our staff. So this automated email is very unhelpful.

I've searched high and low and it doesn't seem possible to customize the email. Is that really the case??

I'm not from an IT background - I'm from a communications/usability background. To me, this is a fundamental flaw. I don't understand why the template for the email isn't an editable file, or why it can't simply be replaced by another template. Does anybody know of a solution?

[#2]

Hello, I hear what you're saying and you're not the only one asking for it. As you noticed during your research this cannot be customized so the option you have is to simply disable the welcome message when a user is being added to the underlying group (using PowerShell).

To disable the setting -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$false.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-unifiedgroup?view=exchange-ps

[#3]

To describe the welcome email as horrible would be a compliment, it is far worse than horrible.
And to compound the issue, via powershell you need to disable it per team, you can't disable it globally.
So if we move to creating teams via PS and disabling the message, you would think you could then use a Power Automate or a logic app to send a more suitable and branded welcome email, but no, it isn't that easy because the "When a new member is added" flow is also designed for targeting a specific team.
User Voice is gone....how do we get the message through to MS that we want better options around the new member welcome email?

[#4]

@AengusM it is possible to disable it for all sites! See: Office 365 Group: How to Disable Welcome Email for new members? - SharePoint Diary

[#5]

@Arie_de_Hond After the group has been created ... or during creation if using a script ... there is no default off/disable setting.

[#6]

@AengusM That's true. I found out myself today. If only you could brand the email....

[#7]

This is what we do and we are also sending out a customized "account activation" email and then a "welcome email" - all done outside of the Microsoft default method.

[#8]

I agree!! It would be great if the welcome/invite emails for teams could be customized via a template or similar! The way is works now is not very user friendly!

@tdnewk I'm curious how you managed to send a customized welcome email outside Microsofts method? Is it possible to get the invite link from the email somehow?

[#9]

@Felix_D3 

Yes,

I would be happy to show you what we did and I can check if we can give you the code.  In summary our use case:

We support collaboration between the B1G Universities and use our own 365 tenant for part of that with an exclusive focus on Teams. We have a homegrown “CRM and access manger” with an MS SQL backend that keeps track of which people need to be members on which team.  All teams are private in the tenant and all external people come in as guests (with a few exceptions) so they all use their own 365 credentials to get in.

When we need to add a new person to a team, the process is:

• Adda record for them into our “CRM”
• Send them a custom email outside of the 365 environment that welcomes them and has a link to “ activate” their access to a team in our tenant.
• We developed a custom app to act as the “activation” which is an Azure app that simply has them login using their credentials.  This step does require consent with some of our stakeholder 365 tenant admins as it shares name, and upn with us.
• If they successfully login, they are automatically added to the team since we now know their upn to put into the tenant.  We have found that the email address we use for the invitation is not always the actual UPN.
• Another email goes out with a link to the tenant and other resources we provide (like an email list for the group – an external application) with a support email address.

If you would like a demo, I am sure that can be arranged and I can check on getting the code for you to review.

Why did we turn off the automatic invitations in the tenant and use our own? The Microsoft ones look really polished and such, but they referenced 365 GROUPS not TEAMS and that was seen as very confusing to our stakeholders.  We do not use the rest of the tenant for the stakeholders (word, excel, outlook) because they are guests -  plus we did want to add in our own custom text.

Best,

Tim

[#10]

Hi Tim and thank you for your reply and also the kind offer of giving a demo of your solution.
This is helpful information for me in our business. I might ask you for a demo in the future but we need to get some other work sorted out before adressing this issue.

Best regards, Felix

[#11]

uhm I noticed that when I create an O365 group from Teams by creating a new Team, then the parameter -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled is $false initially.
BUT users still get a Teams Welcome Message if they are added via teams. The sender of the welcome message is a generic MS Teams
If people are added to the group by other means, e.g. Azure Portal, then they dont get a welcome message.

When the group is created from another workload for example when you create a new planner board. Then -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled is $true initially. And users which are added are getting the welcome message, but this time the sender of the welcome message is the group itself. And not the generic senderadress from Teams.