How to Create Office 365 Group?

Office 365 groups are objects that contain user lists. Office 365 groups used to share resources within and across different Azure apps (Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, OneNote, Skype for Business, Power BI, Dynamics CRM, etc.) and the organizations. Office 365 groups are stored in Azure Active Directory and can be Private or Public.

Creating Office 365 Group via Admin Portal

You can create an Office 365 group using the Exchange/Office 365 Admin Center.

1. Connect to your Office 365 administrator mailbox and go to the Exchange Admin Center;
2. Select Recipients and click Groups in the right pane;
3. On the Basics tab, specify a unique group name, email address and description (optional);
4. In the Privacy field, you can select the type of the group: Private or Public;
5. Click the Save button to create a new group;
6. After that, a window will appear in which you can add members to the group. Select the accounts you want to add and click Add.

You can also create an Office 365 group from other products that using Azure Active Directory, for example: Outlook (both online and desktop client), SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Power BI, Yammer, etc.

Creating Office 365 Group Using PowerShell

In order to create Office 365 groups with PowerShell, you need to import Exchange Online PowerShell module:

$LiveCred = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

To create a new Office 365 group, use the New-UnifiedGroup cmdlet.

Create a group:

New-UnifiedGroup –DisplayName "ITBros Admins" -Alias "ITBrosAdmins" -AccessType Public

Hint. To display all groups in your Azure tenant, use the Get-UnifiedGroup cmdlet.

Now with the Add-UnifiedGroupLinks command, you can add members to your Office 365 group.

Add the user Brett.Jackson to the group:

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity "ITBrosAdmins " –LinkType Members –Links Brett.Jackson

You can make this user the owner of this group:

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity "ITBrosAdmins" –LinkType Owners –Links Brett.Jackson

Hint. You can set multiple owner for Office 365 group.

To add users to a group from a list in a CSV file, you can use the following PowerShell script:

Import-CSV "C:psnew_admins.csv" | ForEach-Object {

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity "ITBrosAdmins" –LinkType Members–Links $_.member

}

You can add a subscriber to the group (receives updates by email):

Add-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity "ITBrosAdmins" –LinkType Subscribers –Links Mary.Jordan

To list all members of the Office 365 group, run the command:

Get-UnifiedGroupLinks –Identity "ITBrosAdmins" –LinkType Members

To hide a group from the global address list (GAL) and other lists in your organization, use the command:

Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "ITBrosAdmins" -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

You can also set a mailtip for your group (MailTip appears in the Outlook address bar of a user who is trying to send email to the specified group):

Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "ITBrosAdmins" -DisplayName "This is group of ITBros sysops"

To close the opened PowerShell session with Office 365, run the command:

Remove-PSSession $Session

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