Disable Office group creation

Every Exchange user has an OWA mailbox policy that governs what they can and can’t do with their mailbox. Updating this mailbox policy removes the ability for users to create Groups. Because OWA policies are per user, you can limit the ability to create Groups for some users and not others. At this time, the only way to update the mailbox policy is through Windows PowerShell.

These commands disable group creation for OWA and Outlook only. If you want to disable the group creation in your organization, use Azure Active directory settings. Check out Windows PowerShell for more details.

To disable Group creation for all users

1. Start Windows PowerShell.
2. At the prompt, type:

   Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity yourdomainname.com\OwaMailboxPolicy-Default -GroupCreationEnabled $false

To disable a policy for a subset of users

1. Start Windows PowerShell.
2. Create a new mailbox policy by typing this command, replacing <policy name> with your policy. (If you already have an OWA mailbox policy, skip to the next step.)

   New-OwaMailboxPolicy –Name “<policy name>”

3. set the GroupCreationEnabled value to false, replacing <policy name> with the name of your policy.

   Set-OwaMailboxPolicy –Identity “<policy name>” –GroupCreationEnabled $false

4. Set the policy on the mailboxes of the user who isn’t allowed to create Groups. Replace <user> with the name of the user.

   Set-CASMailbox –Identity <user> -OWAMailboxPolicy “<policy name>”