Office 365 Groups - How to create groups with a unique display name?

[Dominic Horne]

Is it possible to create Office 365 groups created via Team Sites, Planner, Yammer, Stream and Teams with a unique display name? If yes, How?

We would like to prevent the creation of Office 365 groups with duplicate display names in the organization.

[#2]

The display name is not a parameter that's enforced for uniqueness, so there is not setting you can configure. You can however specify it when creating the Group and change it post-creation, so simply integrate a simple check whether that name already exists in your processes. 

[#3]

Users are free to create Office 365 groups via Team Sites, Planner, Yammer, Stream and Teams using the corresponding user interface.

How can you integrate a simple check in the creation process?

[#4]

Simple answer: you cannot integrate a simple check in the creation process

[#5]

But you can limit the creation process only to people that understand the need to use proper display names :)

[#6]

Or you can run the Get/Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlets in a script to periodically check for bad group names and then rename them.

[#7]

@Dominic Horne 

You can avoid group and Teams duplicate names by implementing a self-service request for Teams. 

This solution also gives Admins more control over naming convention and blocked words. You can modify the script to your preferred naming conversion. Or simply use it as is. You would need a PowerApps form to capture the requests, a SharePoint site to store the requests and an internal email relay server to send request status to users (or use PowerAutomate send email feature). All that is described in this article.

https://insterswap.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/how-to-develop-microsoft-teams-self-service-app-to-fix-t...

Finally, you have to create a scheduled job for the script and let it run every 5 to 10 mins interval to process user requests in the background. Mine runs every 5 mins. Good luck!