Useful PowerShell cmdlets To Administer Office 365 Groups

Note

Before you can run all these PowerShell cmdlets given below, you need to load the Exchange Online management shell by following this link. I’ve given a screenshot below for your reference.

Listed below are the operations that you can perform by following the PowerShell commands mentioned below.

• Get the list of all the Office 365 groups in your tenant
• Remove an existing Office 365 group from the tenant
• To make changes to an existing Office 365 group
• Get the membership and ownership information of an Office 365 group /all the Office 365 groups in your tenant
• Get the list of all the Office 365 groups in descending order
• Get the list of all Private Office 365 groups in your tenant
• Get the list of deleted Office 365 groups in descending order
• Get the list of orphaned Office 365 groups in your tenant
• Retrieve the list of recently created Office 365 groups
• Update the quota of a new group if a team site exists
• Create new Directory Settings for Groups template
• Update the classifications for all the Office 365 groups
• Update the privacy of an Office 365 group based on its classification
• Determine where a group was provisioned (Planner, Yammer, Teams etc.)
• Get the list of Obsolete Office 365 groups in your tenant

So, let’s look into all these operations in detail below….

1. To get the list of all the Office 365 groups in your tenant.
   Get-UnifiedGroup
   
   
   

2. To remove an existing Office 365 group
   
   This will remove a specific Office 365 group from your tenant.
   Remove-UnifiedGroup -Identity "Test Group"

3. To make changes to an existing Office 365 group in your tenant
   Set-UnifiedGroup

Ex 1

Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "HR Team" -AccessType Private

This example changes the Office 365 Group named HR Team from a public group to a private group.

Ex 2

Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "HR Team" -PrimarySmtpAddress [email protected] -RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled $false

This example makes the following changes to the Office 365 Group named HR Team,

4. To get the membership and ownership information of an Office 365 group/all the Office 365 groups in your tenant

Get-UnifiedGroupLinks

Ex

Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity "Transport Department" -LinkType Members

This example shows the members of the Office 365 Group named Transport Department

Similarly, you can use the script below to get the list of all the members from all the Office 365 groups in you tenant.

Get Office 365 group members

This will run and display the results as shown in the screenshot below.

5. To get the list of all the Office 365 groups in descending order.

1. Get - UnifiedGroup | Select Id, DisplayName, ManagedBy, Alias, AccessType, WhenCreated,
2. @ {
3. Expression = {
4. ([array](Get - UnifiedGroupLinks - Identity $_.Id - LinkType Members)).Count
5. };
6. Label = 'Members'
7. } | Sort - Object whencreated | Format - Table displayname, alias, managedby, Members, accesstype, whencreated

6. To get the list of all private Office 365 groups in your tenant.
   
   1. Get - UnifiedGroup | Where - Object
   2. {
   3. $_.AccessType - eq 'Private'
   4. } | Sort - Object whencreated | Format - Table displayname, alias, managedby, accesstype, whencreated
   

7. To get the list of deleted Office 365 groups in descending order.
   
   1. Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup | Sort-Object DeletedDateTime -Descending | Format-Table Id, DisplayName, Description, Visibility, DeletedDateTime

Note
To run this command, you need to do the below mentioned steps, else you would end up getting an error as shown in the image below. If you pay close attention to the cmdlet you would notice that this is related to Azure AD and hence you need to load the Azure AD PowerShell module for this.

I’d suggest performing these tasks in a different PowerShell window for ease of use.

1. Uninstall the production module of Azure AD by running, (Uninstall-Module AzureAD) as this cmdlet works with the preview module of Azure AD.
2. You cannot have the production module and the preview module running on the same machine as per Microsoft’s documentation mentioned in this link here.
3. Once done, please go ahead and install the Preview module by running (Install-module AzureADPreview)
4. After that, please connect to Azure AD by running Connect-AzureAD as shown in the image below
   
   
   
   
   
5. Once you’re done connecting to Azure AD, please go ahead and run the above-mentioned cmdlet to get the list of deleted Office 365 groups in descending order and you will get the results as shown in the image below. In my case, I don’t have any deleted Office 365 group and hence it didn’t return anything.
   
   
   

To get the list of orphaned Office 365 groups in your tenant

To retrieve the list of recently created Office 365 groups

This will run and update the quota of the site as shown in the screenshot below.

To create new Directory Settings for Groups template

There are multiple templates that are part of your Azure AD tenant. This template can contain a settings object which has a collection of values. By using these values, we can set the parameters below. This needs to be done before you can set any values.