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Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support. Overview of Microsoft 365 Groups for administrators
In this articleMicrosoft 365 Groups is the foundational membership service that drives all teamwork across Microsoft 365. With Microsoft 365 Groups, you can give a group of people access to a collection of shared resources. These resources include:
With a Microsoft 365 group, you don't have to manually assign permissions to each of these resources. Adding people to the group automatically gives them the permissions they need. Any user can create a group unless you limit group creation to a specific set of people. If you limit group creation, users who cannot create groups will not be able to create SharePoint sites, Planners, teams, Outlook group calendars, Stream groups, Yammer groups, Shared libraries in OneDrive, or shared Power BI workspaces. These services require the people creating them to be able to create a group. Users can still participate in group activities, such as creating tasks in Planner or using Teams chat, provided they are a member of the group. Groups have the following roles:
Only global admins, user admins, and groups admins can create and manage groups in the Microsoft 365 admin center. You can't be a delegated admin (for example, a consultant who is an admin on behalf of). As an administrator, you can:
If you prefer a more automated way to manage the lifecycle of your Microsoft 365 groups, you can use expiration policies to expire groups at a specific time interval. The group's owners will get an email 30, 15, and 1 day before the group expiration that allows them to renew the group if it's still needed. See: Microsoft 365 group Expiration Policy. You can administer your groups from the Microsoft 365 admin center or by using PowerShell. If you have many users, such as in a large corporation or enterprise, you may have many users who create groups for various purposes. We highly recommend that you review Plan for governance in Microsoft 365 groups for best practices. Group limitsThe following limits apply to Microsoft 365 Groups:
Managing your Microsoft 365 groups is more effective when you have actionable information about groups usage. The Microsoft 365 admin center has a reporting tool that lets you see storage use, how many active groups you have, and how users are using the groups. See: Microsoft 365 Reports in the admin center for more information. Sensitivity labelsYou can create sensitivity labels that the users in your organization can set when they create a Microsoft 365 group. With sensitivity labels, you can configure:
For example, you can create a label called Highly Confidential and specify that any group created with this label will be private and not allow external users. When users in your organization select this label during group creation, the group will be set to private and group members will not be allowed to add external users to the group. Important If you are currently using classification labels, they will no longer be available to users who create groups once sensitivity labels are enabled. For information about creating, managing, and using sensitivity labels, see Use sensitivity labels to protect content in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 groups, and SharePoint sites. Which Microsoft 365 plans include groups?Any Microsoft 365 subscription that has Exchange Online and SharePoint Online will support groups. That includes the Business Essentials and Business Premium plans, and the Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 plans. The group takes on the licensing of the person who creates the group (also known as the "organizer" of the group). As long as the organizer has the proper license for whatever features you want the group to have, that license will convey to the group. If you have an Exchange-only plan you can still get the shared inbox and shared calendar features of groups in Outlook but you won't get the document library, Planner or any of the other capabilities. Microsoft 365 groups work with Azure Active Directory. The groups features you get depends on which Azure Active Directory subscription you have, and what licenses are assigned to the organizer of the group. Important For all the groups features, if you have an Azure AD Premium subscription, users can join the group whether or not they have an AAD P1 license assigned to them. Licensing isn't enforced. Periodically we will generate usage reports that tell you which users are missing a license, and need one assigned to them to be compliant with the licensing requirements. For example, let's say a user doesn't have a license and they are added to a group where the naming policy is enforced. The report will flag for you that they need a license. Related contentLearn about Microsoft 365 Groups (article) FeedbackSubmit and view feedback for Additional resourcesAdditional resourcesIn this articleWhich of the following is a Windows 10 rule for creating new usernames?Which of the following are Windows 10 rules for creating new usernames? The username can be no longer than 20 characters.
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