When you create a Microsoft Team, a Microsoft 365 group is created to manage the team membership like Owners, members, guests. I would rather say the Microsoft 365 group is a backbone of a Team. Through the group you also get an email address for the MS team. Find the other Microsoft 365 services which gets created per this documentation whenever there is a Team provisioned
On this blogpost let us see how to enable a team which can also act as an email distribution list so that you can send an email to all the team members, by default this option is disabled. You will have to be an Owner of the team to set this up. There are couple of ways to do this
- Graph Explorer
- Outlook
- Exchange Online Powershell
- Exchange Online Administrator
Graph Explorer:
Graph explorer is a utility that will let you make requests and get responses against the different graph endpoints as a signed in user (Delegated User). To enable the email distribution functionality, we will have to get the group id of the team for setting a value to True for the property autoSubscribeNewMembers. To get the Group Id information go to the Team and click the Get link to team as shown below
Copy the content from the popup which should be in the below format
To get the group details like Email Address, Mail Nick Name, Display Name etc make a GET request to the following endpoint from the explorer
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/groupId
Make a PATCH request to the endpoint https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/groupId with the payload
{
“autoSubscribeNewMembers”:true
}
Now make a GET request on the following endpoint with the group id of the team https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/groupId?$select=autoSubscribeNewMembers
to get its status. It is all set now.
Outlook:
The Microsoft 365 group inbox for a Team is not available in Outlook but it can be accessed through the SharePoint site associated to the group. Open the SharePoint site from any of the Teams channel as shown below
Click Conversations on the left navigation
The URL of the Outlook will be in following format: https://outlook.office365.com/mail/group/domain/mailNickName/email
Access the settings of the group
Click Edit group from the Group Settings
On the Group Settings popup, enable the Subscription as shown below and then Save it. By default this setting is disabled for the Microsoft 365 group.
Exchange Online PowerShell:
The same setting can also be enabled from Exchange online PowerShell if you have Exchange online Administrator access on the tenant. Make sure the Exchange online PowerShell module is installed. Follow the steps below to turn on AutoSubscribeNewMembers which distributes emails to all users
- Load the module by the running the command Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement
- Connect to the Exchange online PowerShell in Microsoft 365
- Connect-ExchangeOnline -UserPrincipalName userId@domain.com -ShowProgress $true
- Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity 539818c4-XXXX-XXXX-b781-78dff1762b72 -AutoSubscribeNewMembers or Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity “Team Display Name” -AutoSubscribeNewMembers
- To disable the setting: Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity ” Team Display Name ” -AutoSubscribeNewMembers:$false
Refer to the documentation from Microsoft for more Exchange online commands related to the Microsoft 365 group.
Exchange Online Administrator
Login into the Exchange Online Admin center and click on Groups from the dashboard section. Execute the below steps
- Find the group associated to the team (Team Display Name) from the list and then select
- Click on Edit (Pencil Icon) from the ribbon
- On the General tab, Enable the property Subscribe new members and then Save
Summary: The same setting can also be applied to a Team created through a Microsoft 365 group. Hope you have found this informational. There were already lot of blogs talking about groups
Reference:
https://sharegate.com/blog/office-365-groups-explained
https://www.jumpto365.com/blog/everyday-guide-to-office-365-groups
Mohamed Ashiq Faleel 