To help safeguard UAB data, public-facing Microsoft Groups will be turned private beginning April 25.

Groups are the crossroads for many Microsoft products, such as Teams and Outlook, and make them a vital asset that needs to be protected properly. Current group members will see no change in access to Groups, but Group owners will need to add people to their Group instead of users joining on their own.

“We want our users to have peace of mind knowing that their inboxes and groups have an extra layer of security. Switching these entities to private will allow their information to stay in their group only,” said Brett Bates, system analyst.

Along with the switch from public to private, new Groups created will be automatically labeled as sensitive. This will mark any data shared within the Group to also be labeled as sensitive. Learn more about UAB’s data classification rules.