Office 365: Adding Office 365 group owners through Outlook – Configure the link for adding Owners/Members to the Office 365 groups

Hi All,

Today new finding 😊

Background: We have project where we were governing the Office 365 sites (modern team sites and Teams) / classic sites. But there is little bit difference while governing the modern team sites / Microsoft Teams and classic sites. For modern team sites and Microsoft Teams behind the scene Office 365 Group is created which is different than normal SharePoint group. We were governing the sites/teams for at least two admins.  But we changed approach bit for Modern team sites / Microsoft teams. Since in both the cases Office 365 group is created we thought governing the Office 365 Group itself rather modern sites/teams. So, we are planning to maintain two owners for Office 365 group. If group has less than two owners, then we are sending mail with URL to add the owners for the group.

For classic site we just need to check if Site Collection have the two site collection administrators if not then share the link for adding site collection administrators.

Implementation: URL to add site collection administrator for classic site is straight forward –  /_layouts/15/mngsiteadmin.aspx. So, no issues for adding link to this page of site in email.

But for modern team sites / Teams there is no direct way to set the owners of the group. One way is itself from the respective modern team site or Teams. Which I covered in my previous two blogs – Office 365 – Modern Team Sites / Office 365 group – Few findings related to user management : Adds owners from the respective team sites itself and Office 365 – Microsoft Teams: Adding Owner to the Teams : Adds owners from the Microsoft Team Desktop client

But since we need to share the link to mail, we don’t have URL to set owners for modern sites / teams directly. As in my first article related to this, we can add groups owners from the site itself, but it was from the home page no specific page such as available for classic site – /_layouts/15/mngsiteadmin.aspx

After researching a bit found one more way which is from Office 365 Outlook to add the members to the groups and then promote them as Owners from the UI. Also, we get the direct URL which we can share in email as well.

Here, we will discuss here from how to do manually and share respective URLs:

Steps:

Go to the Office 365 Outlook as (Please observe URL at every steps), here URL is https://outlook.office.com/owa/?realm=youcando.onmicrosoft.com&exsvurl=1&ll-cc=1033&modurl=2 (youcando.onmicrosoft.com – my trial tenant)

Figure 1: Office 365 – Outlook – Office 365 Groups

Next from above image, consider we will add owner for the group “PrashamTest” – last group in above image. We will click on the respective group and will redirected to group mails – conversation tab https://outlook.office.com/owa/?realm= youcando.onmicrosoft.com&exsvurl=1&ll-cc=1033&modurl=2&path=/group/prashamtest@youcando.onmicrosoft.com/mail

Figure 2:Office 365 – Outlook – Group Conversation

From the above image there is link at top right-hand side “2 members” if we click on this link we will be redirected to “Office 365 groups people” page as

Figure 3:Office 365 – Outlook – Adding Owners/Members to Office 365 group from outlook

If we check the URL here is

https://outlook.office.com/owa/?realm= youcando.onmicrosoft.com&exsvurl=1&ll-cc=1033&modurl=2&path=/group/ prashamtest@youcando.onmicrosoft.com/people

this link we can easily configurable and share in email. Actual even in URL we no need to specify query string parameters like – realm, exscurl and modurl still it works like

https://outlook.office.com/owa/?path=/group/prashamtest@youcando.onmicrosoft.com/people

again, notice the above URL, we just needed group email id – in above link “prashamtest@youcando.onmicrosoft.com” is group email id. Through Graph APIs we will easily get the group email id (soon I’ll publish new article for getting Office 365 group email id using Graph APIs 😊)

So part of the URL https://outlook.office.com/owa/?path=/group/ is hardcoded then <Office 365 group email id> and again “/people” is hardcoded. In this way we can programmatically configure the link for adding owners/members to the Office 365 groups.

Thanks for reading 🙂

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