Teams naming policy

I have come across a few organizations, where the creation of new teams in Microsoft Teams is limited to a few administrators. This is off course a method to make sure the administrators still have work to do, but a rather ineffective way to control the names being used.

As you might know, when creating a Teams team an Office 365 Group, a Sharepoint site, and a mailbox is created as well.

In this case we want to make sure any Teams team created is following this naming policy:
"Team [GroupName] [Company] [Department]", so if a user from Engineering in Contoso creates a team called ProjectX, the name of the Teams team will be: "Team ProjectX Contoso Engineering".

Supported Azure AD attributes are [Department], [Company], [Office], [StateOrProvince], [CountryOrRegion] and [Title]. [GroupName] is a mandatory entry in the policy.

1. Make sure you have the newest AzureADPreview Powershell module installed.

Uninstall-Module AzureADPreview
Install-Module AzureADPreview

2.
Import the module and connect to Azure AD.

Import-Module AzureADPreviewConnect-AzureAD

Sign-in to your account.

3. Fetch the current settings

$Setting = Get-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | where -Property DisplayName -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id
$Setting.Values

If the $Setting.Values returns an entry proceed to step 5

4.
Get the settings template

$Template = Get-AzureADDirectorySettingTemplate -Id
(Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | where -Property DisplayName -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id

Create a new settings object based o the template

$Setting = $template.CreateDirectorySetting()
New-AzureADDirectorySetting -DirectorySetting $setting 

5.
Save the setting for the team naming policy

$Setting["PrefixSuffixNamingRequirement"] =“Teams [GroupName] [Company] [Department]"
Set-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | where -Property DisplayName -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id -DirectorySetting $Setting

That´s it.
Now we can see the new PrefixSuffixNamingRequirement is in place

(Get-azureADDirectorySetting | Where-Object {$_.displayname -eq "Group.Unified"}).values

Our next problem is no one is allowed to use the word ProjectX in our Teams. Also words as CEO, NextLevel and payroll is not accepted.

Fetch the settings again.

$Setting = Get-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | where -Property DisplayName -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id

Set the blocked words list - the words are case insensitive, note that substrings are not checked, so Class will be permitted even is Lass is blocked.

$Setting["CustomBlockedWordsList"]=“ProjectX,CEO,NextLevel,payroll"

And save the settings again

Set-AzureADDirectorySetting -Id (Get-AzureADDirectorySetting | where -Property DisplayName -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id -DirectorySetting $Setting

Now also the BlockedWords List is updated.

All these settings are also available in the Azure portal now.

When a user creates a new team, this is the user experience in Teams.

When a user tries to create a new team with a blocked word, like ProjectX.

Provide easy access to call queue optin/optout

As more and more services transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, also call-queues and auto-attendants are available for a Teams user organization.

In the call-queue, there is an option to allow for agents to opt-out of the call-queue and hence not receive calls from the call-queue.

In Skype for Business, this can be accessed from the client settings.

However, when the user has upgraded to Teams, there is not a link, or setting, that can help the user to the settings, they need to remember the URL themselves. Not the best option, my bet is the URL will be lost, soon after opt-out of the call-queue.

To provide easy access to the settings page, we can create a custom tile in the Office 365 applauncher. Go to the admin page in Office 365 -> Settings -> Organization Profile and select "Add custom tiles for your organization". If this option is not present, you need to assign a license, provision an Exchange mailbox and login to Outlook Web client. The mailbox and license can be removed afterwards.

Select "Add a custom tile"

Add these settings and click "Save"

Now the users can easily access the settings page from the tile in their applauncher and they can even pin the tile to the starter for quicker access.

The user can now opt-out and change other settings easily and the URL will not be lost.