Owner tab
This tab displays the primary and additional owners of the group. You can do the following, depending on the Group Owner policy.
- Change the primary owner or even remove it.
- Add and remove additional owners for the group.
Additional owners have the same privileges as the primary owner to manage the group.
Only users, contacts and security groups can be set as the primary and additional owners of a
group.
If you specify a group, all its members are considered additional owners.
You can also specify Exchange additional owners for the group. See the Group properties - Email tab in group properties.
- For groups in an Microsoft Entra ID based identity store, only users can be set as primary owners. Moreover, Microsoft Entra ID supports multiple primary owners for a group. Exchange additional owners are not supported.
- A group must have at least one primary owner.
Owner
The primary owner of the group.
To change the primary owner, click Browse next to the Owner box to launch the Find Dialog Box, where you can search and select a primary owner.
If the administrator has not enforced the selection of a primary owner in the Group Owner policy, you can also remove the primary owner. Click the Remove button next to the Owner box to remove the primary owner.
In a Microsoft Entra ID based identity store, use the Add and Remove buttons to update the group's primary owners.
Suggested Owners
The Directory Manager portal can suggest a primary owner for orphan groups, provided that the Suggest Owner/Manager setting is enabled by the administrator in Directory Manager Admin Center.
The owner is suggested with respect to the group’s membership; Directory Manager checks the managers of group members and the user who shows up most as a manager is suggested as the group owner. This user may or may not be a member of the group.
For example, when 40 members of Group A have User A as their manager and 38 members have User B as a manager, User A is suggested as Group A’s primary owner. User A may not necessarily be a member of Group A.
- Click Make Owner to set the sug gested user as the group's primary owner.
- You may also click Show more options to view a list of suggested owners.
Additional Owners
Lists the additional owners of the group, if any.
The Additional Owners grid displays the following information:
| Column Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Type | The object type of the additional owner, such as user or group. |
| Name | The display name of the additional owner. |
| Ownership | Indicates whether an object is a temporary or permanent additional owner of a group. The available ownership types are:
|
| Beginning | Displays the beginning date of the temporary addition or removal. |
| Ending | Displays the ending date of the temporary addition or removal. |
| Do not notify | By default, all group-related notifications (such as expiry, deletion, and renewal notifications) are sent to the primary owner and all additional owners, so they can take the necessary action indicated. To exclude an additional owner from receiving notifications, select the Do not notify check box. NOTE: When a Smart Group Update job runs on a group, the notification behavior is as follows: Even when the Do not Notify check box is selected, the additional owner will receive the notifications if the administrator has included its email address for job-specific notifications. |
For each column, a filter is also available that lets you filter records based on a criterion.
For example; to show objects whose display names start with D, type D in the box under the Name
header and press Enter.
The Managed By Life Cycle job updates the temporary ownership of groups by adding and removing
temporary owners on the specified dates.
Consider a scenario where the Managed By Life Cycle job is scheduled to run once a week, say Mondays. If an object is to be added as a group’s temporary additional owner for three days - Wednesday till Friday, it will not be added. This happens because the Managed By Life Cycle job did not run on the particular days for temporary ownership update.
Add
To specify additional owner(s) for the group, click Add.
Enter a search string to locate the object to add as an additional owner, or click Advance to use the Find Dialog Box for performing a search.
Import
You can also specify additional owners for the group using an external file. Click Import to launch the Import Additional Owners wizard for importing additional owners. See Import Additional Owners for further information and instructions.
Export
You can export the list of additional owners to an external file. Supported file formats are: .txt, .csv, .xls, .xlsx and .xml.
Click Export to launch the Export Additional Owners wizard for exporting additional owners. Select the attributes you want to export. For information and instructions, see Export additional owners.
Remove
To remove an object from the additional owners list, select it and click Remove.
On saving group properties, you may observe a message, asking you to select X number of additional owners. It occurs because the Group Owner policy defined for your role at the identity store level requires that the group must have at least x number of additional owners. Do the needful and then save the information.