Ability to Customize Office 365 Group's Welcome Email/Message
Since the Office 365 groups are now the center stage/focal point for the majority of the Office 365 products/services, it will be great to have the ability to send the customized welcome emails whenever we add someone to the group either via the user interface or using Microsoft Graph API.
This functionality can be set at Tenant level or at individual Office 365 group level. By default, it should be off.
The reason this functionality is important because the default welcome message does not contain enough information to let the users know what this group is about and what will be its usage. The customized welcome message will help organizations to communicate effectively the intended usage of the Group and other relevant information. The customized welcome emails are really helpful for non-technical users.
If Microsoft can not provide this functionality via User Interface at least this functionality should be available via Microsoft Graph API. Right now the only way to suppress the Group's welcome email messages is via Spam Filter (which is not a viable option) and send customized emails to avoid duplicate welcome email messages.
Prashant G Bhoyar
shared this idea
AdminMicrosoft 365 Groups Feedback
(Product Owner, Microsoft Office 365)
responded
While you cannot customize the default welcome mail for Office 365 Groups, disabling the welcome mail is possible with an extra parameter in the Set-UnifiedGroup cmdlet in Exchange PowerShell: -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$false. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/users-and-groups/set-unifiedgroup
Use this as a part of a custom group creation flow if you would like to restrict and/or customize the welcome mail for many groups across your tenant.
16 comments
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Melanie Henderix
commented
we are automatically provisioning O365 groups by using the Graph API so we are not using PowerShell. Is there a way to disable the welcome email?
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Alexandru V. Sainsus
commented
this is a very important request regarding loyalisation of users to the new group
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Jonathan spinosi
commented
I would like to see the welcome message that O365 sends out for Teams invites be able to edit with extra information for the team. This function would allow us to add information into the welcome message that relates to the group that someone is being added to.
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Joseph Paniagua
commented
Yes, this is a needed feature, I can't believe it hasn't been implemented yet.
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Ben K.
commented
the problem with this comlet is, if you run get-unifiedgroup before and after making the param returns null. no confirmation it's set or not. and, some instances the welcome message still sent.
please note when creating a unified group it takes sometimes to be able to get the group and set it. what's is the time frame sending out welcome message?
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Anonymous
commented
does the disabling of the welcome message also work for guests?
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Anonymous
commented
The suggestion to try disabling the message doesn't address the first part of the request to customize the message, which would be extremely helpful in providing instructions to new members to various groups as they are added.
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anonym
commented
yes.
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anonym
commented
Yes absolutely
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Frank Hiemstra
commented
Yes, we need this. Right now!
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Dave dudek
commented
yes. needed.
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Anonymous
commented
It would be useful if the welcome message could be enabled/disabled during the creation of the O365 group instead of controlling this at the tenant level. Also agree that having the ability to customize the welcome message would allow for a more effective means of communicating to the users.
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Anonymous
commented
Since the default information is not valid for us (not using Outlook 2016) and the main part that we use in a Office365 group is the Team site in SharePoint, we need at least the link to the site in the mail.
We are in a multi tenant (20+ domains and all not using the same platform for collaboration, we need to turn of this mail for only some domains. Today we have created a rule under Mail flow to capture this mails so now no information is sent (for our domain).
At least something like when you add a new member to a SharePoint group where you can add info to the mail and also avoid to sent it. -
Ken N
commented
+1 here, We use these for our project initiations, be nice to add some customizatins on this. At least the basic message. "Project X has been Initiated"
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Bhaskar Tripathy
commented
It would be a nice feature to add the ability to disable welcome email for the entire tenant.
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David Conradie
commented
FWIW there's a setting on the O365 Group: "WelcomeMessageEnabled" which controls this behaviour. Per https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/How-to-remove-the-Welcome-Message-when-a-new-member-joins-a/td-p/56573 "You can use the following command to suppress the welcome message for any new users added to the group as a member. ... pass "false" as the value to suppress the welcome message.
Set-UnifiedGroup <groupname> -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnabled:$<true/false>