Office 365 group management cmdlets
We can now manage Office 365 Groups with new cmdlets. Microsoft has released new sets of –UnifiedGroup & –UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlets for Office 365 to control & manage groups. Lets see the list of commands that are available for the administration of the Groups in Office 365.
Creating a Group:
Run New-UnifiedGroup -DisplayName “Department” -Alias dept -EmailAddress dept@domain.com
. This command creates an empty group. We have Add-UnifiedGroup to add the owner & the members of the group.
Modifying a Group Settings:
We can use Set-UnifiedGroup command to change settings like the ability to receive emails from outside the tenant & to change the primary email address:
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity “Sales Department” -PrimarySmtpAddress Sales@domain.com -RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled $false
Removing a Group Setting:
We can run Remove-UnifiedGroup command to delete an existing Office 365 group
This command Add-UnifiedGroupLinks is used to add members to the group. (In the below example we are adding User1 & User2 to the Sales department Group)
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity “Sales Department” -LinkType Members -Links User1@domain.com,User2@domain.com
Adding Owner to the Group:
To add owner to the created group we can run the following command:
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity “Sales Department” -LinkType Owners -Links Admin@domain.com
Removing Members from a Group:
We can use Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks command to remove owners & members from an existing group. (In the below example we are removing User3 & User4 from the sales Department Group)
Remove-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity “Sales Department” -LinkType Members -Links User3@domain.com,User4@domain.com
Disabling Group Creation in OWA:
We can use Set-OWAMailboxPolicy command to create a policy to not allow the users to create groups when the policy is applied to the user. (Below is an example of applying the OWAMailboxPolicy to user1 , which will stop her from creating groups)
- First create a policy called “notallowedtocreategroups” by running Set-OWAMailboxPolicy “notallowedtocreategroups”
- Then run this command to apply the policy to a specific user :
Set-OWAMailboxPolicy “User1” -OWAMailboxPolicy notallowedtocreategroups
Ratish Nair
Microsoft MVP | Exchange Server
Team @MSExchangeGuru
