How to Create an Office 365 Group: Methods Explained

Read time: 8 minutes

Admins can create a Microsoft 365 group, either via Outlook or Teams for application specific function, and Microsoft 365 Admin Center for organization wide functioning. These groups simplify managing team members and sharing data without any difficulty. This blog talks about the basics of Microsoft Groups and the different types of groups. Apart from that, we talk about how to create an Office 365 group without losing any data.

What are Microsoft 365 Groups?

Microsoft Office 365 Group provides a platform for collaboration that allows teams to work together by creating a single identity and a single set of permissions across different Microsoft 365 apps. These apps include Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote, Skype for Business, Power BI, and Dynamics CRM.

Different types of Office 365 Groups include:

Features	Public Group	Private Group	Dynamic Group
Visibility	Anyone in the organization can view data like files, emails, contacts, attachments, etc.	Only invited members can view chats and data.	Limited visibility to active members of the group.
How to Join	Users can easily join without needing the approval of group owner.	Invite-only group, users can only join if they’re invited or if their joining request is accepted.	Users are added or removed automatically based on configured settings.
Membership	Can be managed either by members or owners.	Strictly managed by group owners.	Rules-Based membership in Microsoft Entra-ID.
Best Use Case	Company-wide announcements, open-topic sharing, general discussions.	Confidential matters, sensitive HR and leadership conversations.	Large scaling company-wide team which grow as the company grows.

Easy Methods to Create an Office 365 Group

Users get confused on how to create a Microsoft 365 group to manage your data easily. It’s not such a tricky task, you just need to know the right methods. You can create new groups in Office 365 with the help of Microsoft 365 Admin Center and PowerShell. We’ll explain each method in detail below.

How to Create a Microsoft 365 Group via Microsoft 365 Admin Center?

You can create Office 365 Groups via Microsoft 365 admin center from the Global Admin account.

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

After creating a Group, all related resources, including Shared mailbox, Calendar, and SharePoint Sites, get provisioned automatically. If Office 365 shared mailbox is not showing in Outlook, then you can reconfigure newly created group again.

How to Create a Microsoft 365 Group via PowerShell?

Groups can also be created in Office 365 by running commands in PowerShell. Let’s learn how to create a group and add members and owners to an Office 365 Group.

Making an Office 365 Group using PowerShell gives you the power to control the Group properties. However, you first need to build a remote connection to Exchange Online. Then, it would help if you used the New-UnifiedGroup cmdlet for creating an office 365 Group with PowerShell.

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

$365Logon = Get-Credential
$Session = New-KSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $365Logon -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection
Import-KSSession $Session

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.

New-UnifiedGroup –DisplayName “Test O365 Group 1.”

Create a group with critical limitations.

New-UnifiedGroup –DisplayName “Test O365 Group 1” -Alias “TestO365Group1” -AccessType Public

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

Adding Members and Owners to Office 365 Group

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-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity “TestO365Group1” –LinkType Users – Links Kernel

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity “TestO365Group1” –LinkType Stakers –Links Kernel

Add member:

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity “TestO365Group1” –LinkType Members – Links AftabA

Add subscriber:

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

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity “TestO365Group1” –LinkType Subscriber –Links AftabA

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

$Groups = “group 01″,”group 02″,”group 03”
$Groups | ForEach-Object {
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity $_ –LinkType Members –Links “Kernel” }

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.

Import-CSV “C:\members.csv” | ForEach-Object {
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity “TestO365Group2” –LinkType Members –Links $_.member
}

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.

Get-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity “TestO365Group2” –LinkType Members

List owners of a Group.

Get-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity “TestO365Group2” –LinkType Owners

The above commands can help you create Office 365 Groups easily.

Migrate Office 365 Data to the Created Groups

After creating new Office 365 groups, you need to migrate all data to the newly created groups. But how to move loads of data, knowing that even a single mistake can cost you heavily. Going by what experts say, using a dedicated Office 365 migration tool helps to migrate your data without any data loss. A tool like Kernel Office 365 Migration tool is the best choice in this case. This tool is specifically designed for Office 365 tenant to tenant migration. It has advanced filters integrated into it that enable you to migrate specific data, including Office 365 Groups, based on your requirements.

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Common Issues While Creating Office 365 Groups

There’s a chance you can face some of these common issues while creating groups in Office 365:

Group isn’t showing up: If you can’t see the newly created group in Outlook’s address book or your Teams app, there’s a backend issue. Wait for 24 hours, then contact IT team if it still doesn’t show up.
Permission issue: Sometimes the ‘Create New Group’ option is missing in Outlook because it’s restricted by IT admins. This is done to prevent unnecessary creation of groups by users.
Duplicate group names: You might encounter the ‘Group name is already taken’ issue while creating the groups if you’ve taken any name or alias that’s currently being used elsewhere. Group names and email addresses in Office 365 must be unique across your entire tenant.
Violation of naming policy: Many organizations set up strict group naming policies that limits the use of certain words or symbols. Violation of these polices can prevent you from naming your Office 365 group.

Best Practices to Create an Office 365 Group

Here is how to create Office 365 group PowerShell with maximum efficiency:

Multiple admins of single group: An Office 365 group must have two group admins. This is beneficial in case if one admin is unavailable, then another admin can oversee the operations and manage the group.
Implementing naming policy: Set up a clear and easy to follow naming policy for your Office 365 group.
Set up an expiration policy: If you need to use a group for a limited period of time, you should set up an expiration policy for groups. This helps in automatically deleting all the inactive groups.

The Final Thought

Creating an Office 365 Group is not a challenging task, but it can be very difficult if you don’t know how to do it the right way. With the given methods, admins can create an Office 365 group in simple steps. If you face any issues while creating Office 365 groups, go through the troubleshooting section of our blog to resolve your issue. Moreover, use a professional solution if you’d like to avoid all the risks and for a user-friendly process.