Microsoft Teams: How to disable Teams Creation

When enabling the Teams license in Office 365, every member within the organisation can create new teams. Giving your employees the possibility to create teams themselves and according to their needs increases acceptance of the newly introduced tool.

Nevertheless, it can lead to problems if many employees have high permission levels for team creation. Often it is not clearly defined when it is necessary to create a team and when a channel or even just a chat is sufficient. It can also lead to duplicate teams with the same purpose being created more than once. Team creation can quickly cause uncontrolled growth that confuses your employees with too many teams without any real benefit.

Find out how Parking Zürich solved this problem – read our case study.

To prevent uncontrolled growth of Teams, it is a best practice of Microsoft Teams Governance to disable the creation of teams. However, there are disadvantages to completely stopping users from creating teams. Strict restrictions can demotivate users or make them lose interest.

Instead, to prevent users from creating teams in an unsupervised way, we recommend implementing a controlled version of teams creation with Teams Manager, offering a request and approval process for teams.

But for now, here is a step-by-step guide on how to disable teams creation completely!

How to disable teams creation in Microsoft Teams in 3 steps

Import-Module Microsoft.Graph.Beta.Identity.DirectoryManagement
Import-Module Microsoft.Graph.Beta.Groups


Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "Directory.ReadWrite.All", "Group.Read.All"


$GroupName = "<YourGroupName>"
$AllowGroupCreation = "False"


$settingsObjectID = (Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).id


if(!$settingsObjectID)
{
    $params = @{
	  templateId = "62375ab9-6b52-47ed-826b-58e47e0e304b"
	  values = @(
		    @{
			      name = "EnableMSStandardBlockedWords"
			      value = "true"
		    }
	 	    )
	    }
	
    New-MgBetaDirectorySetting -BodyParameter $params
	
    $settingsObjectID = (Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting | Where-object -Property Displayname -Value "Group.Unified" -EQ).Id
}


 
$groupId = (Get-MgBetaGroup | Where-object {$_.displayname -eq $GroupName}).Id


$params = @{
	templateId = "62375ab9-6b52-47ed-826b-58e47e0e304b"
	values = @(
		@{
			name = "EnableGroupCreation"
			value = $AllowGroupCreation
		}
		@{
			name = "GroupCreationAllowedGroupId"
			value = $groupId
		}
	)
}


Update-MgBetaDirectorySetting -DirectorySettingId $settingsObjectID -BodyParameter $params


(Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting -DirectorySettingId $settingsObjectID).Values

Note: In order to execute the script, you need the preview module for Powershell ‘AzureADPreview’. If you already have installed the AzureAD module, you need to uninstall it first.

Watch this video for a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to deactivate teams creation in Microsoft Teams:

The creation of teams is now disabled for users. This AzureAD Security Group will be the only one that can later create teams. Note that Global Admin members can also still create Microsoft Teams.

Parking Zürich used Teams Manager to stop uncontrolled growth in Microsoft Teams. Felix Peider,​ Head of IT at Parking Zürich AG, says:

“Through Teams Manager, we implement structured guidelines and approval processes for the creation of teams.“

Read more about how Parking Zürich prevents uncontrolled teams creation with Teams Manager!

Now you know how to disable teams creation. Teams Manager offers easy controls not just for team creation, but also for most admin problems in MS Teams. Check out our features or book a quick demo now!