How to Create a Governance Automation Online Policy and Service for Office 365 Groups

Creating a GAO Online Policy

Step 1: To enable business users to request Office 365 Groups through Governance Automation Online, you must first login into Governance Automation Online and select ‘settings’ and from there, click ‘create’, and then select ‘group policy’.

Step 2: Give the policy a name, and it is recommended that a short description is added as well.

Step 3: Select a category for this particular policy and an Azure AD profile, which was previously configured at the AvePoint Online Services level.

Step 3: Options. On the next page, you find all the options related to the creation of the group. For instance – storage quota, if you would like to set a storage quota. If you have any lifecycle options you would like to enable, for example, if the group is no longer necessary, you may want the owners to be able to request that it be deleted. Then, select a previously configured approval process, which determines through whom the request will be routed. Scrolling down further will reveal other options, such as the inactivity threshold, which allows you to set a period of time after which no actions within the group have been performed, then an inactivity threshold task will be created during which someone will go in and review the group. You can set up reminders for when this inactivity threshold task will be executed or you can choose to set it to automatically delete. The Lease management setting also allows you to set a predetermined expiration time for the group. You may also select who gets notified once the group is approaching a certain storage threshold if you so wish.

Step 4: If all your options are set how you like, click ‘save and activate’ to make this policy available and usable in services. The policy now needs to be leveraged in a Governance Automation Online service.

Creating a GAO Online Service

After you’ve created a Governance Automation Online policy, you then place that policy within a service, which is something that your end users can request through their service catalog. To accomplish this, log on to Governance Automation Online and click ‘settings’ on the homepage, then select ‘service’.

Step 1: Select ‘create’ at the upper left corner of the service management page. Because the policy you created was an Office 365 Group policy, go under ‘provisioning’ and allow users to create a group, the type of service that we are going to use in association with the policy.

Step 2: Give your service a name and a short description, select a language, and a category by either choosing an out of the box default or creating your own.

Step 3: For this instance, we then select the option to allow users to make requests from their service catalog.

Step 4: Who has access? If you don’t want to impose any limitations, select ‘allow all users to use this service’.

Step 5: Select the individual who will serve as the service contact. Then, below that, if the administrator contact doesn’t automatically fill in, select whomever you want.

Step 6: Next, select your app profile, which will have been previously configured in AvePoint Online Services. Then select the privacy settings of your group – do you want a public or private group? Then choose where conversation will land. You can set them to land in peoples’ inboxes, which is standard Office 365 practice or elsewhere. Then set your outside sender settings, where you can allow or disallow people from outside the group to send things into it. Then select your language. If you select more than one language, you may then set a default language.

Step 7: Next, select your primary group contacts. You can select ‘requester’, using wild cards ($) so that the individual requesting the group, it will be theirs. You can also select a secondary group contact but it’s not required. Then select who will be the group owner selecting either ‘business user’ or ‘IT admin’. If you choose IT admin, you must specify.

Step 8: Then, select the group’s members. You can set them manually or, by leaving this space blank, the owner of the group to invite people once the group has been created or allow users to make decisions at the time of provisioning.

Step 9: Select the actual policy, in this case ‘group requests’. Click next.

Step 10: Metadata – is there any metadata that you want to add? You can configure custom metadata in Governance Automation Online.

Step 11: Select a group name. If you leave this option blank, the group name will be up to the end user. Then decide if you would like the group to be linked to other services in Office 365 using the check boxes.

Step 12: Select your approval process. Choose an individual to serve as the approver for your type of request, which is pre-configured in Governance Automation. Then choose any custom actions you want to be taken – for instance have it run scripts before or after the group is created, then decide when you want those to run before approval, after approval, or after execution, which you can schedule.

Step 13: Save and activate.