Wednesday, 3 August 2016

Playing with Office 365 Groups

What are Office 365 Groups?
Microsoft "A distribution list is a set of email addresses. You can use the distribution list to send an email message or meeting invitation to all the addresses at once. An Office 365 group includes a distribution list but also includes a shared:
·        Inbox for group email communication
·        Calendar for scheduling group meetings and events
·        Library for storing and working on group files and folders
·        OneNote notebook for taking project and meeting notes
Planning tool for organizing and assigning tasks and getting updates on project progress."
Open the Exchange Online Admin Console, click Recipients and Groups.

Click the Add button and select Office 365 Group.

Input a Group Name, and Group Email Address, for some reason inside the GUI you cannot change the Group's primary SMTP address away from the onmicrosoft.com domain. This can be done using the following PowerShell command;
 Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "Group Name" -PrimarySmtpAddress rbdemo@domain.com


The Privacy settings are not for external privacy, these are to control who from inside the organization can join the Office 365 Group without authorization. PowerShell command to configure this.
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "Group"  -AccessType Private
The Subscriber Newsletter option, if enabled ensures that users personal email accounts are kept up to date with the events happening at a group level. 


You configure who is automatically added to the group at creation. If you set the Privacy to Public, users can auto discover and enroll into the group.
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "Group"  -AccessType Public


The option to have users who are members of the Office 365 Group Send As the group is available. This means any mail sent from this user, will appear to have come from the group and not the individual.
$group = "RB Demo"
$user = "jblue"
$365Group = Get-Recipient -RecipientTypeDetails groupmailbox -Identity $group
Add-RecipientPermission -Identity $365Group.Name -Trustee $user -AccessRights SendAs 


This setting in Exchange is often confused with Send on Behalf, in which the users identity is displayed even if they are sending from another users mailbox.

By default an Office 365 Group does not access e-mails from external recipients, however you can configure this by using the following command;
 Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "Group" -RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled $false 


The Office 365 Group pane is pretty nice, you can view Conversations, Calendars, Files (hosted on OneDrive), Notebook (OneNote) and Connectors to services such as Trello for resource management. 

Office 365 Group files are hosted by your SharePoint Online tenancy, therefore you might want to set storage quota's on each group to ensure they do not consume too much data storage from your SharePoint Online.
The Office 365 Group is provisioned with it's own SharePoint Online site using the following convention;
Most SharePoint Online tenancies are configured to use Automatic storage pooling. If you want to configure an Office 365 Group with a quota, this must be set to manual. 

The following commands can be used to set a quota on the OneDrive file storage for an Office 365 Group, if the SPO is set to Automatic Storage Management, this command will fail.
 $365Group = Get-SPOSite –Identity https://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/groupname
Set-SPOSite –Identity $365Group -StorageQuota 3000 -StorageQuotaWarningLevel 2000