MC99370: Removing SuppressWarmupMessage from UnifiedGroup PowerShell

[Darrell Webster]

A new message in the Office 365 Message Center advises that you will no longer be able to suppress the initial welcome message for a new Office 365 Group.
Was this a useful command? Why would an admin wish to suppress the welcome message?

[#2]

Interested on knowing also this and why the team has decided to remove the parameter

[#3]

That's the message create in the Group conversations, not the welcome message sent to users. I've seen people asking for options to supress the latter, which is now possible. Not sure that this one will have much impact, the only problem I have with it is that it's automatically put in the Group/bypasses the transport pipeline. But that's a minor issue.

As to why people might want to supress this, think of compliance scenarios, if I have a policy to declare every conversation in the Group as record, I certainly dont want auto-generated junk to appear there.

[#4]

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@Darrell Webster wrote:
Why would an admin wish to suppress the welcome message?

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Because it's a communication from Microsoft, not from the company. Some corps want full control over the wording of comms to staff.

[#5]

Got it. So losing this suppression command could be a problem for big corporates.

[#6]

Probably not so much a question of big or small, more how much they like to craft their own messages to their own end users.

[#7]

Hi All,

We saw that many customers were getting confused between the “warmup” email and “welcome” email, this discussion is one such example. Admins who have a good reason to suppress the welcome email, end up suppressing the warmup email instead. Warmup email is the first email that is posted in the group shared conversation space and it is a core element to the Outlook experience. It provides a quick intro to the group with links to a few actions users can take to get started. In addition, when the warmup email is suppressed, it provides a poor first run experience to users who navigate to a group which has no conversations yet. There is no impact to what is sent or received to a user’s Inbox due to this parameter and for all purposes, this change should be benign. To suppress the welcome email, you can set the UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled parameter, more information here -https://technet.microsoft.com/library/mt238274(v=exchg.160).aspx.

Thanks,

Krish

[#8]

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@Krish Gali wrote:

Warmup email is the first email that is posted in the group shared conversation space and it is a core element to the Outlook experience. It provides a quick intro to the group with links to a few actions users can take to get started.

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I'm not confused. That's the message I'm referring to. It's a message created by Microsoft and contains instructions that the customer might not want for their own end users. Suppressing it allows the customer to control the communication to ensure it's relevant and appropriate for their intended use of Groups. For example, the customer might not want the advice to "Connect apps like Twitter and Trello..." being seen by their users.

If customers were getting confused over the two parameters that is because their use is not clear from the name. The warmup message says "Welcome to the GroupName Group". Of course someone is going to assume that UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessage is the parameter that controls that.

[#9]

It's two different things though. Suppressing a system generated email doesn't help nor prevent users from using groups in a specific way. We released usage guidelines which was a key admin ask to help convey how groups can be used within an organization. We are constantly building new improvements, and if customizing a system email is important, please enter it in our uservoice site here - https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups

[#10]

Well, you guys thought that system generated messages were OK for Clutter too, then you had to provide options to customize those...

Anyway, I dont think removing this option makes that big of a difference, but in general it's nice to have. "Confustion" is not a good reason to remove anything, it's a good reason to examine naming/coding policies though.