Recover or Delete Office 365 Groups via the Exchange Admin Center

Last week, Microsoft started rolling a small update through the service, allowing us to restore (and delete) Office 365 Groups via the Exchange Admin Center. In case you have missed it, here’s the Message center post (MC125402):

Message center post

and the corresponding Roadmap item:

Roadmap post

The new functionality integrates seamlessly with the EAC and is very easy to use. Simply open the EAC and navigate to Recipients, then Groups, select the Office 365 Group in question and perform the necessary action. The below screenshot illustrates the important elements:

EAC recover Group

Behind the scenes, the EAC seems to be calling the Remove-UnifiedGroup cmdlet when pressing the delete button and the UndoSoftDeletedUnifiedGroup cmdlet when trying to restore the Group, as shown below:

Cmdlet logging120417 1613 RecoverorDe5

Probably due to the expected delay in synchronizing the Office 365 Group status between Azure AD and ExODS, in my case I am being presented with an error message every time I perform a delete/restore operation in the EAC:

Error message

Remember that Office 365 Groups are “special” in this regard, with “notifications” being responsible to keep the object properties in sync across the different workloads.

Apart from the error message though, the action is performed successfully. If you check the Group status via the Office 365 admin center or the Azure AD PowerShell cmdlets, it will be correctly reflected. EAC will eventually “catch up” on it as well, so try few refreshes.

Additional details on the new feature and the Group recovery process in general can be found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Restore-a-deleted-Office-365-Group-b7c66b59-657a-4e1a-8aa0-8163b1f4eb54?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

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