Office 365 Groups Permissions : How to Enable\Disable Groups or Edit Members

In this post we will look at the details of Office 365 Groups Permissions and how to enable, disable Office 365 groups for specific users or all the users in the company.

An Office 365 Group is a discussion group where you can invite colleagues to Collaborate on a single topic lets say a project using a dedicated Outlook (shared inbox), Calendar, File repository to share Documents and Notebook. You can read more about the basics here.

If you are starting with Office 365 Groups seehere.

The following blog post is about Office 365 Groups (or Groups for Office 365) Permissions and how to revoke or assign specific users permissions to Create or edit Office 365 Groups in Office 365.

Firstly, all users by default can Create Groups via their Outlook mailboxes in Office 365. Users self-organize and self-manage these groups so a little assistance from admins is required. In cases however, where users leave the company or need assistance, a global administrator can assist by creating or deleting groups using group dashboard in the Office 365 admin center.

Group dashboard in the Office 365 admin center –

Its a place from where a global administrator can view, create, and delete groups, and can also add or remove group administrators or members.

Global administrator don’t have to be a group member to perform the group operations.

To navigate to the group’s dashboard global admins can navigate to Groups in Office 365 admin center and then select the group to edit.

but this is the story of manually editing groups and it’s members. What if the Office 365 Groups needs to be disabled for all or specific users- so they cannot create groups or can edit the membership. These advanced operations can be done sing PowerShell.

To Disable Creating Groups for all users :

set-OwaMailboxPolicy -GroupCreationEnabled $false -Identity OwaMailboxPolicy-Default

The Resulting screen below shows a user where no option to create a new Group is available. This does not apply to non-global administrators.

If the users are already in their mailbox, they might see the new button but the below error screen will be presented when they try to create a group.

To re-enable again run the below,

set-OwaMailboxPolicy -GroupCreationEnabled $true -Identity OwaMailboxPolicy-Default

To Disable Creating Groups for specific users, first create a Policy

New-OwaMailboxPolicy -Name DisableOffice365Groups

Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity learningwayinstitute\DisableOffice365Groups -GroupCreationEnabled $false

learningwayinstitute – this is your tenant name.

Once you’ve done, you can then assign it to the user.

Set-CASMailbox test@www.atl-institute.ca -OwaMailboxPolicy “DisableOffice365Groups”

that’s it!