Tom Talks Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 news and opinions

Find Microsoft Teams teams without an Owner, Teams Admin Center and PowerShell

Each Microsoft Teams team should have an owner, preferably two. Owners have the same abilities as members, but also have the exclusive abilities of:

  • Edit team name/description
  • Delete team
  • Add members (in a private team, in a public team anyone can add members)

Equally importantly, owners give IT people who are responsible for the management of a team and it’s content throughout its lifecycle.

Owners can make other members into owners. A team can have up to 100 owners. It’s recommended to have multiple owners to help manage the team; this will also prevent orphaned groups if the sole owner leaves your organization.

Occasionally you may find teams have been created and then the owner has left the organisation (user account removed), leaving the team ownerless. Ownerless teams will still function, but if they are private no one can be added or removed.

The Teams Admin Center (Office 365 web admin UI) does have the ability to see details about teams and see teams without owners. They appear with a 0 and an exclamation.

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Unfortunately, there is no sorting or filtering in this UI, so if you have hundreds or thousands of teams there is no way to find all the teams without owners.

However, finding the teams with no owners in PowerShell is pretty easy. I put together this simple script based on the new GA Teams PowerShell module. It collects a number of summary details about each team, including the owner, member and guest count.

Get-MicrosoftTeams-TeamSummary

From here it’s as simple as filtering all the teams with 0 owners.

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How do you assign a new owner?

That is very simple in the Teams Admin Center, just go into the team and promote one or more of the members to owners.

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About the author

Tom Arbuthnot

A Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master, Tom Arbuthnot is Founder and Principal at Empowering.Cloud as well as a Solutions Director at Pure IP.

Tom stays up to date with industry developments and shares news and his opinions on his Tomtalks.blog, UC Today Microsoft Teams Podcast and email list. He is a regular speaker at events around the world.

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Tom Talks Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 news and opinions