Several operations teams need to email groups containing both employees and external customers, contractors, and other partners. The current approach is to create external users in Entra ID and then add them to Microsoft 365 groups alongside internal users, but this is becoming difficult to manage. It creates a growing number of guest accounts and groups, adds administrative overhead, and can clutter the directory and Global Address List.
I'd prefer not to have IT manually create and maintain every group or external contact. Personal Outlook distribution lists are one possible workaround, but they're difficult to share and maintain consistently when multiple operations staff need access to the same recipient list.
What approaches have worked for managing shared email lists with external recipients while keeping operations teams in control, minimizing directory clutter, and avoiding constant IT involvement?
2 Answers
You could make the operations staff owners of the groups and give them responsibility for adding and removing guests. That keeps IT out of the day-to-day maintenance, provided they’re allowed to create or manage the groups and external identities themselves.
There probably isn’t a perfect built-in option that gives everyone shared, centrally managed recipient lists without creating some form of directory object. The practical route is to define an approval and ownership policy, then automate the repetitive work with something like Power Automate. A request form could require a business justification, named owners, membership changes, periodic review, and an expiration or cleanup date. That would make the process easier for operations while preserving auditing and governance.
That’s the balance I’m trying to find: operations need shared lists they can manage, while IT wants to avoid maintaining external users and large numbers of Microsoft 365 groups. I’m looking for an approach that meets both requirements rather than simply moving the manual work into an automated request process.
The problem is that they currently can’t create groups or external users in Entra, and we don’t want the directory filling up with dozens or hundreds of groups used only for outbound email. IT would still be involved in the initial setup and ongoing administration.