How to Create a Dynamic Team in Microsoft Teams with All Active Employees in Microsoft 365

This post explains how you can create a dynamic team in Microsoft Teams to have all active active employees in your company using Azure AD Group dynamic membership rules.

Introduction

We are living challenging times with the current Covid-19 pandemic crisis and keeping teams together is more important than ever!

Org-wide teams have been around for quite some time, but these are quite inefficient since we don’t have any control on what users are added to the team (service accounts for instance are also added if they have valid licenses assigned to them).

This post explains how you can create a new team in Microsoft Teams containing all active employees in your company based on Azure AD Group dynamic membership rules. Unlike org-wide teams, this approach gives you complete control over what users are added to the team.

The “Team with all employees” scenario makes more sense for small and medium-sized companies. For larger companies, the steps provided in this post can be adapted to create smaller dynamic teams based on Azure AD dynamic membership rules (ex: department teams or any other type of dynamic teams based on valid Azure AD user profile properties).

Pre-Requisites and How-To Steps

Pre-Requisites

The steps described in this post require:

• Azure AD Premium P1 license for all users included in the dynamic team
• If you are using Active Directory, AD attributes have to be correctly configured and synced to Azure AD to allow the dynamic group to retrieve all active company employees (in our example, we are using the companyName attribute and all users with companyName = “Create IT” will be considered as active employees)

How-To Steps

Now it is time for the fun part! Follow the following steps:

1. Create a new Team in Microsoft Teams as you would to create a “normal” team. If the team already exists and you want to change an already existing Team to be dynamic, you can skip this step
2. Go to your Azure Active Directory Admin Center
3. In Azure Active Directory Admin Center, select “Groups”. This option will allow us to access all Azure AD Groups, that contain teams in Microsoft Teams (group type = “Microsoft 365”)

1. Select the group you want to edit and set as dynamic. Membership type should be at this time set as “Assigned”, meaning that all members are added manually.

1. The group details are now shown

1. Select “Properties” on the left menu and change the membership type to “Dynamic user” and click “Save”

1. Select “Dynamic membership rules” on the left menu and add an expression that dynamically retrieves the active employees in the company. In our case, the expression is “(user.companyName -eq “Create IT”) and (user.accountEnabled -eq True)”. Click “Save” to save your changes.

1. The Azure AD Group is now dynamic and users in the group will be retrieved using the expression set in the previous step

1. Select “Members” in the left menu. Now that the AD Group is dynamic, you will not be able to add or remove members from the group manually.

Testing The Results

To test if the configuration was successful, just follow the following steps:

• Add a new user to Active Active Directory, filling the attributes that match the dynamic membership group expression in the Azure AD Group
• Force Azure Active Directory to Azure AD synchronization

Everytime new employees are added to Active Directory and synced to Azure AD, a message in the “General” channel in Microsoft Teams will be shown saying that the user has been added to team!

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Happy Scheduling!

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