In Regards to the Self Service Groups portal for users to create their own Group, creates random email address??

Question

Hello,

Trying to figure out why the Self Service Groups portal creates "random" alphanumeric email address instead of an actual Name that the end user puts in when they create it?

If an Admin does it within the admin center, you get the option for what the email address should be named. But not in the self service portal.

Only thing you can do for policy settings is to add prefix or suffix... but that does nothing good to mitigate an address that may need to be given to an external client/partner.

Anyone see this and figure out how to change this from defaulting to random to something based on the Name the user gives?

Looking at the email address policy for unified groups... only allows you to set what "domains" it will attach that random name to. You can NOT have aliases as you can with user email address policies.

I have two tickets open within Microsoft right now, and they are doing NOTHING to give me any kind of information or workaround.

Hoping some braniac out there has a solution around this issue.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Just to clarify, are you referring to the "My groups" portal or some other endpoint? Seems I am able to reproduce it there, and looks like an oversight to me. The UI should expose all the relevant fields, just like it does in other endpoints that allow end users to provision Groups. As a quick workaround - ask the user to provision Groups via OWA.
It also seems to take ages for a Group created from said portal to appear in Exchange, so I'd classify this as something that Microsoft needs to fix.