#unified groups

[psconfig]

Use Office 365 Groups instead of Site Mailboxes

Site Mailboxes in SharePoint Online have been deprecated. Today the guidance is to use Office 365 Groups for your new collaboration needs. This article will help explain why and how.

Site mailboxes have been used by many organizations as their collaboration tool of choice. It came with a common mailbox to help you coordinate and store team or project related email in one place and a SharePoint site to store all your common files. However, as the way people collaborated has changed over the years, customers have asked for a solution that promotes a more active form of collaboration. Therefore, we have deprecated site mailboxes and encourage you to move to Office 365 Groups which provide a much richer collaboration experience.

In January in MC92090 Microsoft communicated that Site Mailboxes were being removed from SharePoint Online and now MC112937 brings some more detail around what that looks like.

The new SharePoint Online organizations do not have access to the Site Mailbox feature, and existing SharePoint Online organizations can no longer create new Site Mailboxes. However, any Site Mailboxes already provisioned will continue to work. Customers using Site Mailbox feature should consider transitioning to Office 365 Groups.

If you currently have any Site Mailboxes in your SharePoint Online tenant, you can easily find them with the following PowerShell cmdlet in Exchange Online:

Get-SiteMailbox

Get-SiteMailbox will return a listing of all Site Mailboxes, including the Name, ClosedTime, and SharePointUrl.

Should you happen to have some Site Mailboxes, Microsoft has some guidance around why this deprecation is happening and how you can make the transtion to Office 365 Groups at Use Office 365 Groups instead of Site Mailboxes.

Unfortunately, that guidance starts and stops at "Just create a new Group". There is no migration path for the data in your existing Site Mailboxes to the Group's Shared Inbox and no migration path for the data in any SharePoint sites associated with the Site Mailbox.

If you have Site Mailboxes in your organization, you'll want to get ahead of this today and not tomorrow.

[psconfig]

Office 365 Groups Owners Limit Increasing

The number of Owners that can exist in/on/with an Office 365 Group is increasing from 10 to 100 (Groups limits here).

From the Message Center:

Previously, an Office 365 Group could have no more than 10 owners. This limit has been increased to 100. A limit of 100 owners is now supported in Azure Active Directory, Office Admin Portal, Exchange Admin Center, and OWA. Additionally, Distribution Lists that were previously ineligible for upgrade to Office 365 Groups due to the owner limit are now eligible.

The rollout starts today and is projected to be complete by the end of July. The associated Roadmap ID for this change is 20326.

[psconfig]

Governing Office 365 Unified Groups and the GAL

If you're an organization that leverages Office 365 Groups/Unified Groups/Outlook Groups/Groups/I'm Running Out of Names Here© you’ll eventually run into a situation where you’ll want to hide those addresses from the Global Address List. 

For example, you might have an existing shared mailbox or distribution list for users to communicate with your HR department with the e-mail address [email protected] and the description “HR”. Now imagine that the HR group also creates a Unified Group to leverage Planner and a SharePoint site AND as luck would have it they left the name of their groups as “HR”. Even though the Unified Group will use a different e-mail address (let’s say [email protected]) it will still appear as “HR” in the GAL when users are performing searches. 

This leads to a ton of user confusion and miscommunication; exactly the thing Unified Groups is supposed to curtail. Thankfully, you can hide a Unified Group from the GAL with a simple PowerShell cmdlet - Set-UnifiedGroup.

The HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled parameter “specifies whether the Office 365 Group appears in the global address list (GAL) and other address lists in your organization”. By default, this value is set to False ($false), meaning that the group is visible in the GAL and other address lists. By setting this value to True ($true), the group can be hidden from the GAL. The group can still receive messages but will not be visible in the GAL and will not appear in the Groups Discover view. 

So, back to our hypothetical “HR” group. Let’s hide it:

Set-UnifiedGroup -Id [email protected] -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

You can verify that the change was successful by running the Get-UnifiedGroup cmdlet:

Get-UnifiedGroup -Id [email protected] | Select HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled

Once hidden, it can take several hours for the Unified Group to be purged from the address list(s) and then you still have to wait for the clients to pull their address book updates.