Office 365 groups hidden from directory / Directory missing from "New" Outlook

[Paul Robinson]

Two things, slightly related...

1. On the "new" Outlook beta for Office 365, the Directory is missing from "People." You can search for things in the directory, but nowhere to view it that I can find. Am I missing it somewhere or is it truly not part of the "new" Outlook?

2. How I managed to find this was staff reported that they no longer had the email addresses with Office 365 Groups (ones that were created before Teams was a thing) showing up as an autocomplete when composing a message. I found that there is no longer anywhere in the admin for Office 365 or Exchange to hide or show these groups from address lists, and when I looked via PowerShell, the groups have HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled set to True. I had to manually set it to false. These groups have been in use for years now without a problem and this seems to have crept up on its own.

So it seems Microsoft is making some big changes (and quite frankly, unwanted ones for me) to the way the Directory is handled, but I haven't heard any word of this. Anyone have any idea what's up with these two issues?

[#2]

1) There are many missing features in the new OWA, as it's still in Preview

2) The behavior was changed some time ago: https://www.petri.com/hiding-office-365-groups-exchange-clients

[#3]

1. That's a glaring omission to not have in the preview. The directory is fairly important, and asking around those who use the Web App in preview(I typically use the desktop client) and use the directory, they seem to all think it was there not long ago and has since went missing in the preview. Again, an odd behavior.

2. This is true for new Teams that have been created (which I still thing is a poor decision) but as I mentioned, this was an existing group that has existed in our tenant before Teams. Until a week or so ago, it still worked as expected by being able have it show up when the sender started to add the address to the To field. It no longer does so. This group was created well before that change to new Teams being created was made.

This behavior has changed with no notice, and now I have to go through and update any existing Office 365 group to fix this.

[#4]

1) No argument on my end, there were other equally important features missing. Then again, if you have seen the state in which some products have been launched recently, you'd actually appreciate the fact that the team still keeps the new OWA experience in Preview :)

2) I haven't noticed anything similar with any of my tenants. I just run another check, and none of the Groups have HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled or HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled, apart from the ones I've toggled it on. You can always check the Unified audit log to see who made the change, it might indeed been Microsoft.