Real World Computing

Office 365 Groups are No Longer Automatic Mail Groups Until recently, if you created an office 365 group (usually by creating a Teams or a SharePoint site), you would also be able to send that group mail directly via outlook. Unfortunately, with everyone having the ability to create teams and sites on demand -- and very few people following good naming standards, it's very easy to get your corporate address books cluttered. Microsoft received a lot of feedback about this clutter and as a result, they disabled the functionality. Existing Office 365 groups are unaffected but if you create a new one, you'll find that you can't locate them in the typeahead when you want to send mail. You can however, still have your cake and eat it too. You just have to use PowerShell. Procedure Since this is an admin feature and I'm presuming that all admins should be on Multi-Factor authentication now, the instructions are for MFA.  If you're not using MFA, you mig...

Nesting Groups has been a bit of a pain in Office 365 for a while now but there's apparently a few answers (and some updates on the way).   Here's a PowerShell method.  The Setup To start with, we're going to create a group in Office365 Admin. It should be a mail enabled security group . In our example the group will be called; GRP MotherGroup and it will have an email address of MotherGroup@mydomain.com (obviously the domain will be different at your location). For the purposes of this exercise, you'll also want to create several groups to be nested. These are distribution groups and their names and emails for the purposes of our demonstration will be; GRP BabyGroup1  babygroup1@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup2  babygroup2@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup3  babygroup3@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup4  babygroup4@mydomain.com The PowerShell Commands As usual, you'll want to run PowerShell in Administrator Mode. Set-ExecutionPolicy Remote...

If you have a few big groups, you'll probably be asked to provide a list of their members on occasion. Like Notes, if you don't have a CRM on the front of your system, it's hard to get a list of group members that includes anything apart from their name... unless of course, you use PowerShell. Note: If you're copying and pasting from this blog entry, it's worth pasting into notepad so that you can rejoin any lines before pasting into PowerShell. I only give you one command at a time, so it should all be on one line. The Procedure Start PowerShell (in Administrator Mode) and connect to Office 365 Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned (and press Y ) $UserCredential = Get-Credential Enter your email address and password. If you're using 2 Factor Authentication... You'll need to open the Microsoft Exchange Online Powershell Module which should be on your desktop if you've followed the instructions ( see this post ). Enter the following command (c...

It's not an unfamiliar scenario with all of the rebranding that's happening these days. Your Office365 group has the wrong mail domain and now you want to change it. It's the kind of thing that you'd expect to be able to change via the admin portal. After all, there's a neat little domain selector box on the page. Alas, that's not how Office 365 groups work. You need PowerShell for that one. PowerShell to the Rescue PowerShell, the interface you have when you don't have an interface...  Here's how to change the domain on your group. Run PowerShell as an Administrator and type the following commands; Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned $UserCredential = Get-Credential $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity " Group English Name " -PrimarySmtpAddre...

One of the odd things about Office 365 is how much you have to resort to PowerShell to get things done. That's currently the case with the Office365 Groups, a recently introduced type of group that works particularly well across all of the Office365 applications.  I've been setting a few things up with Office365 groups lately and I've had two instances where I needed to do some renames. Once was when the people who asked for the group changed their mind about the name and the other was when I wanted to rebuild an existing sharepoint site (and reuse the name). In both cases, I was able to change the name but the email address itself was greyed out.  The Solution is to use PowerShell Start Powershell by clicking Start and typing PowerShell, then Right-click on the icon and run as Administrator. In the console that appears, type; Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned This elevates some privileges. You'll need to choose Y and press enter.  Next, you...