By now, you may be familiar with Office 365 Groups and/or Teams (if not have a look here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/learn-about-microsoft-365-groups-b565caa1-5c40-40ef-9915-60fdb2d97fa2 or https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/office-365-groups).
With time, an Office 365 Group/Teams may have lost its owner(s) as part of the work life cycle when peoples are leaving the organization.
This introduces a governance issue as you may ended to be in situation where you can no longer identify the owner(s).
Good news, you can now enable your Office 365 Group/Teams to request the members to take ownership of it (not enabled by default).
To do so, connect to your Office 365 administration portal (https://admin.microsoft.com/) and access the Settings\Org Settings blade and then the Services\Microsoft 365 Groups to enable and configure this option
The Ownerless groups option allows you to define:
- which members will get notified with the option to take ownership; either
- all active members
- selected active members
- exclude selected active members
for both “selected” options you will have to define a security group
- the number of active members – default is set to 5, to up to 90
- weekly notification period – from for 1 to up to for 7 weeks
- the sender of the notification – this can be either a specific user account or group
- customize the notification message
- get it applied to all groups or a selection of groups
Once done, a notification will be sent accordingly to your settings.
Identified users will then receive a notification like the below one to take or not ownership of the group
