Simple Ways to Create an Office 365 Groups

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Microsoft Office 365 Groups serves as a collaborative hub, enabling teams to collaborate seamlessly by establishing a unified identity and a consistent permission system across various Microsoft 365 applications. These applications encompass Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote, Skype for Business, Power BI, and Dynamics CRM.

You can create Office 365 Groups via Microsoft 365 admin center as an admin.

1. Login to the Office 365 Admin Center site (https://admin.microsoft.com)
2. To enlarge groups, click on the “Groups” tab on the left side.
3. Click Add a Group and then select Office 365.
4. Enter a group name and a unique email address for the privacy of the Group.
5. Click on the “Select Owner” tab for your group management
6. Click on “Add” to start making the Microsoft 365 group.

Upon the creation of a Group, all associated resources such as Shared mailboxes, Calendars, and SharePoint Sites are automatically provisioned. If you encounter the situation where an Office 365 shared mailbox is not appearing in Outlook, you can resolve this issue by reconfiguring the newly created group.

Simple ways to create an Office 365 Group via PowerShell

This article will mention PowerShell commands to create Office 365 Groups and add members and owners to an Office 365 Group.

Leveraging PowerShell to create an Office 365 Group empowers you to have fine-grained control over its properties. To achieve this, you must first establish a remote connection to Exchange Online. Subsequently, you can utilize the New-UnifiedGroup cmdlet to create an Office 365 Group using PowerShell.

Before going ahead, connect the Exchange Online PowerShell session via the following commands:

The PowerShell cmdlet New-UnifiedGroup includes the following key parameters:

• DisplayName – Display name of the new Group
• Alias – Email Group’s nickname. If you omit the parameter, it will produce a handle through the display name.
• AccessType – Group’s privacy type (whether Public or Private)
• AutoSubscribeNewMembers – Add this parameter to auto-subscribe group’s new members

You can follow the below command to generate a new group with minimal parameters.

Create a group with critical limitations.

After creating the Group, you can use the Get-UnifiedGroup cmdlet to get all the available groups.

If you want to add members and owners to the Group, you can use the Add-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlet. It includes the following key parameters:

• Identity – Alias, Display name, Email address of the group, etc. You can find the Office 365 tenant ID with all these parameters and apply them in the cmdlets.
• Links – Hyperlinks, Display name, Email address of the user being added, etc.
• LinkType – Members, Owners, or Subscribers

Add a user as an owner: To add a user as a leader to the group, first, make the user a member of the defined group. To do so, you can follow the below commands:

Add member:

Add subscriber:

Subscribers who get updates via email can be added by changing the LinkType to “Subscribers.”

The parameter Links accept multiple values, using the following syntax: value1,value2. If the values include spaces or otherwise need quotation marks, use the following syntax: “value1?,” value2″,

Add members to multiple office 365 groups

Import Microsoft 365 Group members from a CSV File

You can also add members to a Microsoft 365 Group by importing users from a CSV file. For that, you need to use the below PowerShell commands:
For example, consider the CSV file members.csv, which contains the column member that gathers the member identity in each CSV file row.

Find members and owners of a Group

After adding the members and owners, we can use the Get-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlet to get members or owners of a specific group. For example, the below command lists all members of the given group.

List owners of a Group.

The commands mentioned above are useful for creating Office 365 Groups efficiently. However, if you find yourself needing to migrate existing Office 365 Groups to another tenant, an automated solution like Kernel Office 365 Migration becomes essential. This tool is purpose-built for Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations and offers advanced filtering options. These filters allow you to migrate specific data, including Office 365 Groups, according to your precise requirements.

The Final Thought!

Generating an Office 365 Group doesn’t need to be a daunting endeavor, provided you follow the correct procedure. This article has outlined the process of creating an Office 365 Group using PowerShell commands. Employing these commands, you can establish an Office 365 Group with ease and without encountering any unnecessary complications.