New Feature: Office 365 Groups Naming Policy is Generally Available

Microsoft

Today, we are announcing that the Naming policy feature for Office 365 Groups is generally available. Naming policy enables admins to enforce a consistent naming strategy for Office 365 groups created by users in their organization.

Features:

  • Prefix-Suffix naming policy You can use prefixes or suffixes to define the naming convention of groups (for example: "US_My Group_Engineering"). The prefixes/suffixes can either be fixed strings or user attributes like [Department] that will get substituted based on the user who is creating the group
  • Custom Blocked Words You can upload a set of blocked words specific to your organization that will be blocked in group names for groups created by users (for example: "CEO, Payroll, HR")

How to set up the Naming Policy

The naming policy configuration is created using the Azure AD PowerShell by updating the “CustomBlockedWordsList” and “PrefixSuffixNamingRequirement” properties in the Office 365 Groups settings for the tenant. Once configured, the Azure AD Portals and the Office 365 groups apps enforce the Naming Policy when end users create or edit groups. Please refer to our documentation here for detailed instructions, licensing requirements and limitations.

 

The Office 365 groups naming policy feature is available in general availability today and requires an Azure AD Premium license for every user who creates groups, is a member of the group and the admin who creates the Groups naming policy.

 

As always, we'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have. Just leave a comment below.

 

5 Replies

The licensing around this feature makes it useless:

Licensing requirements

To use the Groups naming policy feature, the following people need an Azure Active Directory Premium P1 license or Azure AD Basic EDU license:

  • Everyone who is a member of the group.
  • The person who creates the group.
  • The admin who creates the Groups naming policy

 

How can I use this feature and not spend the money for a premium license for everyone in my organization?

@ArunV1 You folks sure did take your time with this one... :) Here's a question I've been asking for years now, will we ever see any sort of UI for the naming policy configuration? Or in general for the whole set of AAD settings, not just he ones related to Groups? Not everyone is comfortable using PowerShell, not to mention the unnecessary complicated format utilized by the *-AzureADDirectorySetting cmdlets.

 

And it's a **bleep** shame we can use the exact same feature for free with "traditional" groups. And we even have an UI for it in the ECP. For free.

 

@Deleted for some of the creation points (SharePoint), you can enforce custom forms and implement the naming logic there. For others it will not be possible, but you can always use PowerShell or the Graph to enforce a similar policy post-creation.

@Deleted  You can easily achieve this goal by implementing a governance strategy and use this governance to apply Groups Naming convention inside your organization.


I would suggest you to look at Microsoft Flow + PowerApps & of course the magic Microsoft Graph API :)

 

 

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