Office 365 Groups aren’t that new, but they still sound more alluring than a plain Distribution List or Shared Mailbox. They aren’t the solution that applies to all situations however, and you’ll need to weigh up each scenario as to what fits best.

(for Office 365 Group fundamental considerations, please read Michael Mardahl’s blogpost “Getting off to a good start with Microsoft Office 365 Groups”)

Here’s some things around Office 365 Groups and using them as an email distribution list (DL) that caught me out, or are differences worth pointing out. If you’re thinking of migrating a DL or a shared mailbox to an O365 Group, these are worth considering:

• If a member of an Office 365 Group sends an email to the group, they won’t get that email. It makes sense that you probably don’t want an email that you sent, but it is a change of behavior from traditional DLs. This may change in the future, at least as a toggle-able option.

• If you have Exchange 2010, Office 365 Groups won’t appear in the Outlook client, unless their primary email address is @tenant.onmicrosoft.com – which probably isn’t what you have as the default domain. Upgrading your Exchange to 2013 or newer should resolve this requirement. I blogged this one separately a while ago.

• If you’re in Exchange Hybrid mode and routing your emails to Exchange On-Premises first, Office 365 Groups won’t be able to receive external emails UNLESS you enable group writeback in Azure AD Connect. This feature requires Exchange 2013 or newer, so isn’t possible in Exchange 2010. If you are using dynamic O365 Groups, the group membership displayed on-premises will be incorrect or blank.

• An Office 365 Group mailbox can’t have folders created in it. If staff have access to a shared mailbox and use that to manage their emails under different folders, that’s a no-go for an Office 365 Group. There’s a bunch of other ways you can manage this, but if they specifically want that option, then an Office 365 Group won’t help them.

• By default, users will see a ‘Groups’ option in Outlook (either client or web) which they can drop down, see the groups they’re in, and see the inbox. That’s the only folder that’s visible though, and it can be easy to assume that’s the only folder. There are however, several folders available. You can’t open an Office 365 Group as another mailbox, as you’ll be told via Outlook Web that you don’t have access to the mailbox, and Outlook client won’t recognise the name of the mailbox.
  You can however, use the ‘Open Shared Mailbox’ option in Outlook Web by right clicking on your mailbox in the folder view, or right clicking on ‘Folders’ (depending on if you’re using the ‘old’ or ‘new’ Outlook) and add the Office 365 Group that way. This will give you visibility of all folders and their contents:

• Automating Office 365 Group membership is harder. You either automate membership with a dynamic group, or let the owner(s) do it themselves. Neither are bad options, but dynamic group membership exceptions to rules are harder to do. How do you have a group that’s all Finance, plus these 4 people that aren’t finance? You could have an expression like this, but that is something that could get rather messy to maintain:

(user.department -eq “Finance”) -or (user.mail -eq “[email protected]”) -or (user.mail -eq “[email protected]”) -or (user.mail -eq “[email protected]”) -or (user.mail -eq “[email protected]”)

• Meeting responses work differently to a DL. Say you send a meeting appointment, and have the respones go to a DL – all members of the DL see the response. This can be useful in certain scenarios, but probably not that common. An Office 365 Group works differently, where the ‘Meeting Message Processing Agent’ in Exchange Online will see the meeting response, and send it directly to the Deleted Items folder. This action skips members receiving a copy of the response which might be good generally, but again it’s another different way that Office 365 Groups work when you’re expecting the same as a DL.

That’s what I’ve found so far – if you have any yourself please share and I’ll test/add to the list, and will update with any other tricky scenarios that I come across.