Let’s start with a question.

What do you call a fake noodle?

……..

An IMPASTA

How does this dad joke relate to this blog topic? I get into that below.

Does this ever happen to you: The proliferation of groups or teams in Microsoft Teams or Office 365 is so vast that you don’t know which one you should join? The nature of Teams or Groups aims to foster collaboration within organizations. As an administrator, you want to provide a certain degree of autonomy to your users to foster collaboration across or among themselves. This degree of autonomy leads to a “self-service” scenario where people can just create any kind of groups as they seem fit. As a result, a lot of groups can be created with very similar names. This is a major issue from a user’s perspective if there are a lot of Office 365 Groups or Microsoft Teams within the organization, how does a user know which one or the official organizational team to join?

Fear not. As an administrator, you can implement Microsoft Teams naming convention policies, so your users understand which teams they need to join.  It is pretty severe to disable the self-service and prevent your users from creating new groups. Ultimately, you want to enable people to create groups and teams on an as-needed basis within a guided framework as to not stifle collaboration. Luckily, Microsoft has a series of PowerShell commands you could run for your settings for Groups and Teams.

The way it works is that you can have a prefix to the group name then the suffix.  Here is a good example of the PowerShell command.

Prefix[GroupName]Suffix

Example: grp[groupname][Department]

1. Jim in the department Retail
2. Jim creates the group Team4
3. Result: grpTeam4Retail

The PowerShell command works like automatic categorization based on the name as shown above. The good thing about implementing the naming convention is that you give a unique name to the group and the users can’t change it. However, the administrator can bypass and overwrite the default commands and exclude themselves from the naming convention.

Remember that Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams are really the same objects. Their main difference is that Groups operates on the Outlook interface, whereas Microsoft Teams runs through the Teams interface. Implementing naming conventions helps your users identify and distinguish which teams are created by users versus by system administrators.

Now join me for a quick demonstration to see how this command plays out in setting up your Group or Teams with your naming convention.