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Mihir Yelamanchili's avatar
Mihir Yelamanchili
Brass Contributor
Feb 16, 2018

Is there a way to disable users from creating office 365 groups?

I came to know that we can disable the users from creating office 365 groups globally. According to Office article  we can give permission to only one or few groups to create groups permission using powershell. We can add the users into those particular groups if we want to give permission to create groups. But how we can set exclusively for one user not to create office 365 groups?

  • open a Powershell session to Exchange online

    export the settings of the default owamailbox policy
    Get-OwaMailboxPolicy -identity default | Export-Csv C:\policy.csv
    then create a new-owamailboxpolicy with the same settings as default
    https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351067(v=exchg.160).aspx
    after that edit the policy
    Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -GroupCreationEnabled $false -Identity OwaMailboxPolicy:NewPolicy
    And finally assign the policy to the user
    Set-CASMailbox -Identity user@domain.com -OwaMailboxPolicy:NewPolicy

  • open a Powershell session to Exchange online

    export the settings of the default owamailbox policy
    Get-OwaMailboxPolicy -identity default | Export-Csv C:\policy.csv
    then create a new-owamailboxpolicy with the same settings as default
    https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351067(v=exchg.160).aspx
    after that edit the policy
    Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -GroupCreationEnabled $false -Identity OwaMailboxPolicy:NewPolicy
    And finally assign the policy to the user
    Set-CASMailbox -Identity user@domain.com -OwaMailboxPolicy:NewPolicy

    • Mihir Yelamanchili's avatar
      Mihir Yelamanchili
      Brass Contributor

      We need to create this policy in power shell and assign this policy to the required user right!

  • I am getting error while trying to providing the link in the question. Even if I type that error it is not allowing me to post that.

  • Lou Mickley's avatar
    Lou Mickley
    Iron Contributor

    Keep in mind, if you block users from creating Groups, in Planner for instance, they cannot create a new Plan.

    • Bear in mind that the approach to disable Groups creation via OWA policy is only going to work when trying to create Groups from OWA. Your users will be able to create Groups from any other App in Office 365: Outlook in the desktop, Teams or Planner....in regards of the error you are getting when trying to paste an external URL, I have faced the same problem lately...something has changed in the Tech Community that prevents to add external URLs. AnnaChu can you help here?

      • Mihir Yelamanchili's avatar
        Mihir Yelamanchili
        Brass Contributor

        jcgonzalezmartin wrote:

        Bear in mind that the approach to disable Groups creation via OWA policy is only going to work when trying to create Groups from OWA. Your users will be able to create Groups from any other App in Office 365: Outlook in the desktop, Teams or Planner...


        Is it? That means there is no solid way to prevent users from creating Office 365 groups? Ideally user should not create from any app.

  • The steps are exactly as described on the Microsoft documentation. Disable group creation for all users with Powershell. Give group creation permissions to a security group. Make alle users that are allowed to make groups member of this security group. In your case that means all users except one.

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