Tag Archives: O365 Groups

Configuring the Email settings on O365 Groups

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All modern SharePoint Team sites have an O365 group associated with them. The O365 groups have an email address assigned to them. This is usually in the format of Alias@[tenantName].onmicrosoft.com.

As an owner of a group, you can configure the settings to allow external people to email the group, and you can ensure all emails that are received by the group are sent to all members own email inbox.

The examples below are using the browser version of outlook, this can also be done in the outlook client. (Please note buttons and dialog are in different places and look different too)

Configuring Group email settings as an Owner

  • As an Owner of a Group open browser version of Outlook
  • Under Groups find your Group name
  • Click on the ellipse and click Settings.
  • In Group Settings click Edit group

  • Within the Edit group, there are two check boxes.
    • Let people outside the organisation email the group – Until this is ticked, only people within the organisation domain will be able to send an email to the group.
    • Send all group conversations and events to members’ inbox. They can stop following this group later if they want to. – When this is ticked, all emails sent to the group and events, will be automatically sent to all members own inbox. Note: Members can override this setting for themselves, see below “Configuring Group Email settings as a Member”

    The Email address for the group can be found on the above dialog, under Group email address. Typically the email address is <groupAlias>@<tenant>.onmicrosoft.com. See below on “Global Administrators steps to change the Group Email address to the current domain email“.

Configuring Group Email settings as a Member

As a member of a group you cannot change the settings for everyone in the group, nor can you turn on Let people outside the organisation email the group. You can, however, change what emails come to you.

  • As a member of the group open browser version of Outlook.
  • Under Groups find your Group name
  • Click on the ellipse and click Settings.
  • In Group Settings click Edit group

  • You have the option of 4 settings, which are quite self-explanatory:
    • Follow in inbox
      • Receive all emails and events
    • Stop following in inbox
      • Receive only replies to you and the group events (default)
      • Receive only replies to you
      • Don’t receive any group messages

Global Administrators steps to change the Group Email address to the current domain email

To make this change you need the following pre-requisites:

  • Global Adminstrator / Exchange Administrator
  • Microsoft Exchange Online PowerShell Module downloaded and installed
  • The email Domain you are changing to is an accepted domain for your organisation. 

In the below example, it shows how to change the Group (alias: EmailEnabling) email address from EmailEnabling@abcd.onmicrosoft.com to EmailEnabling@abcd.co.uk address.

Note: The below script is untested by myself, as I don’t have access to a environment that has a accepted domain.


#Connect
Connect-EXOPSSession -UserPrincipalName [your UPN];

#Add the Email Address
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "EmailEnabling" -EmailAddresses @{Add="EmailEnabling@abcd.co.uk"}

#Promote alias as a primary SMTP address
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "EmailEnabling" -PrimarySmtpAddress "EmailEnabling@abcd.co.uk"

#Optional, remove original email address
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "EmailEnabling" -EmailAddresses @{Remove="EmailEnabling@abcd.onmicrosoft.com"}

Finding the related Site from Teams Private Channel Site

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Private Channels gives the ability to restrict the membership further within a Team site. A person can create a private channel, like creating a public channel, except they can add owners/members to the channel from a subset of members from the Team site.

When a private channel is created, what is happening under the covers is a creation of another SharePoint site. A cut down version of a SharePoint site, using the Template TEAMCHANNEL#0. (ID: 69 for those that want to know)

As this is my first blog post about Private Channels, let me demonstrate quickly how to create a Private Channel.

How to add a private channel

  • From MS Teams click on the ellipse next to your Team name, and select Add Channel.
  • Give the channel a name, optional description, and select “Private – Only accessible to a specific group of people within the team”
  • Click Next. On the next page you can add people from the Team to have access to the Private Channel. They can be an Owner of the channel even if they are only a member within the Team.
  • The private channel will show up as a channel underneath your team, with a pad lock next to it, indicating that it is a private site. You will only see this channel if you are a owner/member of the channel.
  • The SharePoint site – which you can get to by clicking on files Open in SharePoint – has the URL made up of https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/sites/<TeamName>-<ChannelName> and the home page of the site is the root of the Shared Document library.

Finding the related site

There are a couple of places I have found out where to get the related site.

Property Bag and Graph API

When I did a PNP Get-ProvisioningTemplate pointing at a private channel site, I discovered in the property bag there is a value called RelatedGroupId and it is Indexed.

  <pnp:PropertyBagEntry Key=“RelatedGroupId” Value=“d99aa865-cd55-46cc-b256-177975ad3e13” Overwrite=“false” Indexed=“true” />

With this value you can then get the SharePoint site of the MS Team using Graph API

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/<group-id>/sites/root?$select=webUrl

or

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/<group-id>/sites/root/weburl

Note: On the parent Team site, there is a property bag value called GroupId. It also has RelatedGroupId, which has the same value.

CSOM using the Site object

The related GroupID can also be obtained in CSOM via the Site object.

Site site = context.Site;
context.Load(site, s => s.RelatedGroupId);
context.ExecuteQueryRetry();

Showing all the private channels from the main SharePoint site

When I used PNP to obtain the Private Channel template and discovered the RelatedGroupId was in the property bag and that it was indexed, means that it is searchable. If you check the Manage Search Schema, you will find the managed property.

This means doing a simple search like below, will return all the private channel sites.

RelatedGroupId:<GroupID> contentclass:STS_Site

Using the Microsoft Search PnP Modern Search SPFX (https://github.com/microsoft-search/pnp-modern-search/releases/tag/3.8.0), very quickly I was able to display links.

For someone who only has access to one of the Private Channels, they will only see one in search.

Unable to change Office 365 Group Membership

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Was recently having a problem trying to change the group membership of a 365 Group. I was trying to add external users to the group, and through SharePoint it always redirects you to Outlook to do this.

  • Click on members top right of the screen.
  • Click Add members
  • Click go to Outlook to add Guests.
  • This should redirect you to the group information for the group, where you can edit; about this group, change membership, see emails, and files related to the group.

The problem I was getting, was that as soon as it hit the above page, it was redirecting to https://outlook.office365.com/people/. I also couldn’t see the Groups part, as highlighted below.

It made no sense that I couldn’t see it, I was a global administrator, I created the site, I was an owner of the site, I had a E5 license.

It turned out, it was a simple thing that took Microsoft Support, and several engineers a while to help me solve. Somehow my account mailbox had been converted to a Shared Mailbox. How or why this happened doesn’t matter.

By going to the Exchange admin centre, clicking on Recipients and Shared it displays all the Shared Mailboxes.

In the example above, David Mamam (a made-up person in my demo tenant) has a Shared Mailbox. If David attempted to click on the ‘go to outlook’ link in the SharePoint site, he would be re-directed to https://outlook.offic365.com/people. To fix this problem, David’s mailbox needs to be converted back to a regular mailbox.

To do this, click on the ‘convert’ link underneath the ‘Convert to Regular Mailbox’ within the Exchange admin center, as show above. The conversion takes a few moments.

Once complete, the user will be able to click the link to modify the Office 365 Group that they were an owner of.