I’m an old school IT guy, in my world provisioning is done via the IT department or via a provisioning tool. What I don’t want is that regular users create all kinds of objects in my environment, whether it be Active Directory, Azure Active Directory or Office 365.

In Office 365 everything is different, multiple services (Outlook, Teams, Planner, SharePoint, PowerBI and others) are using Office 365 Groups under the hood. So, when users create a new plan in Planner or a new team in Teams, they also create an Office 365 Group in Azure Active Directory.

I’m currently working in a 12,000-user environment, and the last thing I want to happen is 12,000 users randomly creating all kinds of groups, ending up in a total mess where nobody can find information and where it is impossible to delete anything without hurting other people.

The solution for this is to assign the creation of new Office 365 to a security group in Azure Active Directory (this can be a cloud object or a synchronized object). To create a new security group in Azure Active Directory you can use the following PowerShell command:

New-AzureADGroup -DisplayName "O365 Group Creators" -SecurityEnabled:$True -MailEnabled:$False -MailNickName "Nothing"

Note. It is also possible to create a security group in the Azure AD Portal.

The next step is to assign the permission to create Office 365 Groups to this new security group. This can only be achieved using PowerShell and the Azure AD Preview Module, using the following script:

$GroupName = "O365 Group Creators"
$AllowGroupCreation = "False"
Connect-AzureAD
$settingsObjectID = (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id
if(!$settingsObjectID)
{
  $template = Get-AzureADDirectorySettingTemplate | Where-object {$_.displayname -eq "group.unified"}
  $settingsCopy = $template.CreateDirectorySetting()
  New-AzureADDirectorySetting -DirectorySetting $settingsCopy
  $settingsObjectID = (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id
}
$settingsCopy = Get-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id $settingsObjectID
$settingsCopy["EnableGroupCreation"] = $AllowGroupCreation
if($GroupName)
{
  $settingsCopy["GroupCreationAllowedGroupId"] = (Get-AzureADGroup -SearchString $GroupName).objectid
}
Set-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id $settingsObjectID -DirectorySetting $settingsCopy
(Get-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id $settingsObjectID).Values

When you run this script, you will see a similar output:

The first box corresponds to the objectID of the security group we’ve created in the first step, just compare with the ObjectID shown in the first screenshot.

The second box shows $false for the EnableGroupCreation property, indicating no other groups are allowed to create Office 365 Groups.

All members of the security group we just created are allowed to create Office 365 groups. There are some exceptions though, Exchange admins, SharePoint admins, Teams admins and User Management admins are by default allowed to create Office 365 groups as well, but typically these are not regular users.

This way you can control who is able to create Office 365 Groups in your environment, and make sure group creation doesn’t explode in your tenant.

More information

• Manage who can create Office 365 Groups – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/create-groups/manage-creation-of-groups?view=o365-worldwide
• New-AzureADGroup – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/azuread/new-azureadgroup?view=azureadps-2.0