How to fix an Office Group with no Owners

Time needed: 30 minutes

You will now be able to proceed to add a new Owner using Powershell

Don’t want to read through the whole thing? Just jump to the script by clicking this!

1. Open Powershell (don’t use SharePoint Online Management Shell)

   At least I had to run it as an admin. Don’t use SharePoint Online Management Shell – you never know if some of the imported commandlet names might conflict!

2. Store your credentials
   

   <pre lang="powershell">$cred = Get-Credential</pre>
   
   This opens a login window, where you can give your admin credentials.

3. Establish a session with Exchange Online

   
   <pre lang="powershell">$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection</pre>
   
   The ConnectionUri is the same for all tenants! Don’t change it.

4. Then import the established session
   

   <pre lang="powershell">Import-PSSession $session</pre>
   
   Executing this command should actually take a while, as PowerShell is importing a lot of commandlets here. After it’s done, you are able to run the next command. If you aren’t, you’ll need to make sure you have enough permissions on the account you’re using!
5. Figure out the alias of your group (you’ll need it in a sec)

   Running something like this returns your groups. Exchange Online calls Office Groups UnifiedGroups. That might be a bit confusing, but it’s very fitting for their role as the one, unifying the access to all different Microsoft tools in Office 365.
   
   <pre lang="powershell">Get-UnifiedGroup</pre>
   
   This command will output something like the below:
   
   
   ^{“Get-UnifiedGroup” cmdlet produces a list of your Office 365 Groups with some default properties shown}
   
   Alternatively, you could run this to get only the “orphaned” groups (without a single owner):
   
   <pre lang="powershell">$Groups = Get-UnifiedGroup | Where-Object {([array](Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $_.Id -LinkType Owners)).Count -eq 0} | Select Id, Alias, DisplayName, ManagedBy, WhenCreated<br>
ForEach ($G in $Groups) {
                Write-Host "Warning! The following group has no owner:" $G.Alias
}
 
</pre>
   
   This will produce something like this:
   
   
   ^{This magic command shows only the Office 365 Groups without Owners. In this case, there’s just one, and its properties are shown nicely.}
   
   If you then need to get just one group (if you want to investigate its properties, for example), you can run this:
   
   <pre lang="powershell">Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity [alias from the list above]</pre>

6. Add your account (or any other) as a member of the group, then as the owner

   This order of commands is required – only members can also be owners! You’ll get an error like this if you try adding the user account as an owner without first making them a member:
   
   <pre lang="powershell"><only members="" can="" be="" owners="" of="" a="" group.="" please="" add="" 'koskila'="" first="" as="" before="" adding="" them="" owners.="" +="" categoryinfo="" :="" notspecified:="" (groupwithoutown...c4-9678a42bd27b:adobjectid)="" [add-unifiedgrouplinks],="" ad="" notamemberexception="" fullyqualifiederrorid="" [server="HE1PR0802MB2186,RequestId=64556147-88ed-4788-90aa-0cbea612cd84,TimeStamp=10/9/20" 18="" 7:54:39="" pm]="" [failurecategory="Cmdlet-ADNotAMemberException]" ae3249d5,microsoft.exchange.management.recipienttask="" s.addunifiedgrouplinks="" pscomputername="" outlook.office365.com="" <="" pre=""></only></pre>
   
   Running these commands yields no output if successful.
   
   <pre lang="powershell">Add-UnifiedGroupLinks [alias_from_above] -Links [your_upn] -LinkType Member
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks [alias_from_above] -Links [your_upn] -LinkType Owner</pre>

7. Verify, that the operation was successful

   You can then verify the success by running this:
   
   <pre lang="powershell">Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity [alias_again] | Select Alias,ManagedBy
</pre>
   
   This should produce your group with your account in the “ManagedBy” column.

8. The End Game: Add yourself as the owner of all orphaned groups

   So, taking what we’ve learned today, in short, this is the script you can use to add yourself as the owner of all the orphaned Office 365 Groups:
   
   <span id="script"> </span>
<pre lang="powershell">$cred = Get-Credential
$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
 
Import-PSSession $session
 
$groups = Get-UnifiedGroup | Where-Object {([array](Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $_.Id -LinkType Owners)).Count -eq 0} | Select Id, Alias, DisplayName, ManagedBy, WhenCreated
ForEach ($g in $groups) {
                Add-UnifiedGroupLinks $g.Alias -Links $cred.UserName -LinkType Member
                Add-UnifiedGroupLinks $g.Alias -Links $cred.UserName -LinkType Owner
}
</pre>