Teams Admin Center Options for Bulk Policy Assignments

Multiple Ways to Make Teams Bulk Policy Assignments

It’s amazing what slips by in the torrent of changes that occur within Microsoft 365. Message center notification MC397476 (last updated 27 July 2022, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 90705) is an example. This is the unassign policies from users in bulk feature that completed roll-out in August 2022.

Revert User Accounts to the Global Policy (Bulk Unassignment)

The idea is simple. Over time, it’s possible that the Teams policies assigned to users become less appropriate. It’s a pain to select user accounts individually to update policy assignments, so this is a method to reset accounts back to the global tenant policy for the following policy types:

• Messaging policy.
• Meeting policy.
• Calling policy.
• Live events policy.
• App setup policy.
• App permission policy.
• Teams policy.

To use the bulk unassign policy feature, go to the Users section of the Teams admin center. The Unassign policies in bulk option is in the top right-hand corner in the Actions drop-down menu. Select the policy type to work with and the Teams admin center displays the set of policies of that type (Figure 1). The greyed-out policies are default policies that don’t currently have any assigned users.

When you select a policy, Teams loads information about the assigned accounts. Click the Unassign button and confirm the action. Teams doesn’t tell you which accounts it processes, just the number of accounts that it successfully reverts to the default (Global) policy for the policy type. Bulk policy unassignments are supported for up to 500 accounts at a time.

Using View Users to Perform Teams Bulk Policy Assignments

Nice as it is to be able to remove (unassign) a non-default policy from a bunch of accounts, the Teams admin center includes what might be a better way to reassign policies (including to revert to the Global policy). MC445744 (13 October 2022, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 97253) covers the change made to allow administrators to view the users and groups covered by a policy.

Many of the major policies managed through the Teams admin center include the Assigned to users and Assigned to groups columns when they list policies (Figure 2).

The links in the columns reveal the set of users assigned the selected policy (Figure 3).

Select the Edit settings option and you can edit the policies assigned to the set of selected users, just like you’d update policies for an individual user or a set of selected users. Direct policy assignments to accounts like this take precedence over group policy assignments.

Other Ways to Process Teams Bulk Policy Assignments

Apart from the options available in the Teams admin center, the other ways to perform Teams bulk policy assignments include:

• Using batch jobs to process policy assignments for up to 5,000 accounts.
• Using Azure Automation runbooks to process policy assignments. The advantage of this method is that you could have a scheduled job to find and process policy assignments for new accounts.

Of course, you can also use PowerShell to find a set of accounts based on some criteria and perform policy assignments on that basis. Here’s an example of assigning a Teams feedback policy (PowerShell is the only way to manage feedback policies) to a set of user accounts based on their department:

Connect-MgGraph -Scopes User.Read.All
[array]$Users = Get-MgUser -Filter "department eq 'IT' and UserType eq 'Member'" | Select-Object UserPrincipalName, DisplayName
ForEach ($User in $Users) {
  Write-Host ("Assigning the feedback policy to {0}" -f $User.DisplayName)
  Grant-CsTeamsFeedbackPolicy -Identity $User.UserPrincipalName -Policy "Tenant Bar Feedback Policy" }

Keep Tracking Change

So much ongoing change happens within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that it’s impossible to keep up to date with everything. Reviewing older message center notifications (we synchronize message center notifications to a Planner plan) is a good way to catch changes that you missed first time round. After all, no one is perfect.

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