Forum Discussion
Hiding Office 365 Groups Created by Teams from Exchange Clients
Teams now hides the Office 365 Groups that it creates from Exchange clients (Outlook, OWA, and the mobile apps). That’s as it should be for groups created for new teams. If you want to hide groups ...
TonyRedmond This simply is not true. Every single team we create has its O365 group show up in the GAL.
PhilHemingwaySTV I'm sure that every team does turn up in the GAL, but only if an action is taken to update its HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled property. All teams created through team-aware admin interfaces set this property to $False. If you create using an ISV app, PowerShell, or some Graph-enabled app, you might find that the property is set to $True. For instance, even Teams sets the property to $True for the special team it creates to control who's allowed to create approvals templates. But the general point holds true: teams created through Teams set HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled to $False.
- That has not been the case in our environment, and I just closed a ticket with Microsoft today, confirming as much.
Here's the relevant part of their email response, "When you create it from PowerShell or the Teams admin center it will be visible. Please create from the Teams App and observe the behavior (the group should be hidden by default)."
Specifically, teams created through the Teams admin interface are visible in the GAL. We require that new teams be created by admins, so our users are prevented from creating their own in the app... and for admins it was natural to create teams through the Teams admin interface. Every last one since we deployed Teams to the company is showing in the GAL. I'd have to get a colleague to run the Exchange PowerShell command for me since I'm not the Exchange admin, but I don't doubt at all they're set to $True.
So it's pretty frustrating that Microsoft documentation says when you create a team in Teams it will not show in the GAL, because this has not been the case at all for our organization, and I feel like it's a glaring error that needs to be corrected.- Right. There's a known gap at present (documented in Office 365 for IT Pros https://gum.co/O365IT/ that the Teams admin center doesn't hide newly created teams. When you create new teams with PowerShell or the Graph, you have full control over the parameters of what the newly created team should do, including the ability to tweak the group hidden setting. But every group created using the Teams desktop, browser, or mobile client should be hidden.
Fortunately, the solution is easy. Have someone with admin permissions connect to Exchange Online PowerShell and run these two lines:
[array]$Groups = Get-UnifiedGroup -Filter {ResourceProvisioningOptions -eq "Team"} -ResultSize Unlimited
ForEach ($Group in $Groups) { Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity $Group.ExternalDirectoryObjectId -HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled:$True -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled:$True }
