Guide: Retrofit your Office 365 groups- and Teams name

Needless to say, creative naming of Groups and Team sites is a never-ending story. This guide, however, let you retrofit the name of those badly named groups.

Now, in order to perform these actions, there are some prerequisites where AzureADPreview and Teams (if you are to retrofit a Teams group) for PowerShell. These packages are installed with the following commands:

Install-Module -Name AzureADPreview
Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams

Connecting and retrofritting

In order to identify the groups that you desire to rename, you could type in the groups name, or E-mail. I prefer the latter for better control.
$UNIQ = Read-Host "Please type the group name/E-mail that you desire to change"

The following code will prompt you as a tenant admin to type in the new name for the group, and the domain for your alias

$NewName = Read-Host "Please type the desired name of the group"
$DomainName = Read-Host "Please type your domain, eg. solaat.no"

In order to clean up clutter (removal of invalid characters in the groups new E-mail), the following command create the new mail alias.

$NM = $NewPrefix + ($NewName -replace " ","" -replace '[^a-zA-Z0-9]', '')

In order to retrofit the group, the code below needs to be altered in line 2 for personalization of the note. The two last lines provides a visual outcome of the change that will happen.

$OldGroupDN = (Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity $UNIQ).DisplayName
$NewNote = (Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity "$UNIQ").Notes + "`n`n - New name by solaat.no"
$NewMail = ("smtp:" + $NM + $DomainName)
$MailPool = (Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity $UNIQ).EmailAddresses + $NewMail
Write-Host "`t" $OldGroupDN "updated to" $NewName
Write-Host "`t" (Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity $UNIQ).EmailAddresses + "updated to" $NewMail

The changes will be committed to the tenant by executing the following commandline;
Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity $OldGroupDN -Alias $NM -DisplayName $NewName -Notes $NewNote -PrimarySmtpAddress ($NM + $DomainName)

Changes done to your group/teams should now be visible in your tenant – or by running the following command;
(Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity $NewName).EmailAddresses

As you may notice, the old E-mail alias is kept, while the new is set as primary SMTP, this ensures that any data or shared notes are still accessible from the old sharing and no new URLs are needed. Hence the outcome in PowerShell should look something like this;

• Alex