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Office 365: Troubleshoot Outlook 2016 access to Office 365 Groups (Uncompleted)

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Information up to 2016/06/24:

Office 365 groups has been released for some time. It's a brand new feature which is a, from my point of view, "pure" Office 365 feature which is not an option for onprem Exchange or SharePoint deployment. Though not all end users will accept it, there must be some users who are interested in this new feature. It could be a common problem that some of them will report that：

"I cannot see my groups in Outlook."

Outlook is so commonly used and it's providing a much better performance than OWA. So the question raised cannot be simply answered by "Please use OWA instead". So admins do need some basic troubleshooting steps to resolve most problems. As an admin, you already know the Exchange Online cmdlets introduced at

Use PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups

but the cmdlets here may have little help on the client access problem. So here is something I would like to share with IT admins regarding Office 365 group access from Outlook 2016 client (Note: Outlook 2016 is the only version which can access modern groups). In addition, if you are interested in Office 365 groups I strongly suggest that you should watch the following ignite session:

Microsoft Office 365 Groups Deep Dive

Next section is for organizations with Exchange Hybrid. If you do not have Hybrid, skip to the next section.

Setting up Office 365 groups to work with onprem users in Exchange Hybrid environment?

You can simply follow the steps mentioned in

Configure Office 365 Groups with on-premises Exchange hybrid

but for the complete lifecycle, I suggest that you need to take the following actions:

  1. Enable group write back in Azure AD Connect
  2. Configure a group domain (e.g. groups.contoso.com), including verify domain/adding domain and set DNS records
  3. Set Email Address Policy for Unified Groups otherwise new groups created will still use default domain rather than groups.contoso.com domain.
  4. Create a Group and make sure it's synced to onprem by AAD Connect (you can manually initiate a sync or wait for the scheduled sync).
  5. Update-Recipient "<group name>“ on onprem Exchange to make it visible in local GAL.

Answers to local mailbox users in Hybrid

Above is a complete set of actions you need to apply before a local mailbox can "join" the group conversation. Even though above actions are taken, I suggest that you should understand some limitation of local mailbox accessing Office 365 groups:

Can

  • See group in local GAL
  • Be added into group by others
  • Send/receive new messages in group conversation

Can’t

  • See group in OWA/Outlook (Even if you are running Outlook 2016)
  • View group conversation generated before you are invited into the group
  • Create new group
  • Proactively join a group
  • Unsubscribe to a group (You will be receiving conversation updates as emails as long as you are set to subscribe to a group)

Anyway it's a big step for a pure cloud object to be accessed by local users. So let's get back to the original question: if a user reported:

"I cannot see my groups in Outlook."

and in fact he/she is receiving messages from Office 365 groups, how should we respond?

"It's expected."

Even though admin has everything set up, local mailbox users will not see groups displayed like a secondary mailbox in Outlook or OWA. This is simply because the ews call to onprem Exchange server for Office 365 groups will simply get a response that this feature is not available.

Answers to migrated mailbox users:

Now let's put local users aside. For a mailbox migrated to Office 365, having Office 365 group in OWA is just a default behavior. Still it's possible that some user will report:

"I cannot see my groups in Outlook."

This time you will need to do some troubleshooting as they SHOULD be able to see the groups attached in Outlook. A normal workflow for discovering an Office 365 group in Outlook 2016 should be:

  1. POST /EWS with request body GetUnifiedGroupsSettings and get the response with UnifiedGroupEnabled is True.
  2. POST /EWS with body GetUserUnifiedGroups and get the response with smtp address of the group.
  3. Use the smtp address to perform Autodiscover to get the MAPI endpoint to access the group mailbox.
  4. Connect to the mailbox and after this step you should be able to see the group attached and you are able to click on it to view group messages.

Step 1 will seldom fail if the mailbox is hosted on cloud. If Step 2 fails, it only means that you haven't joined any groups. I believe most of the problems are with step 3. Autodiscover for Office 365 groups works similarly with a migrated mailbox:

  1. Access SCP and get the onprem autodiscover endpoint if the client is in AD.
  2. If the client is not in AD,

To be continued...