Microsoft Places is now in Public Preview and I am trying to deploy it on our test O365 tenant for a subset of our users there (for evaluation purposes). Microsoft has a deployment guide to this end.

I followed the guide and note the following:

• I have the latest version (7.4.2) of PowerShell installed
• I have the latest version (3.4.0) of the ExchangeOnlineManagement PowerShell module installed
• Running Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role TenantPlacesManagement -GetEffectiveUsers shows that the admin user I’m authenticating with ([email protected]) has the TenantPlacesManagement role
• Running Get-InstalledModule -Name MicrosoftPlaces returns version 0.28.0-alpha after installing it
• I created a mail-enabled security group ([email protected])
• I submitted the opt-in form for the Microsoft Places Public Preview Program (although I haven’t received an explicit response yet)
• I waited a full day for changes to propagate (as per the docs)
• I ran Connect-MicrosoftPlaces and then Connect-ExchangeOnline as per the docs

When I then try to execute the command to actually enable Places for the mail-enabled security group [email protected], it throws an error:

Set-PlacesSettings -Collection Places -PlacesEnabled "Default:false,OID:<GUID for mail-enabled security group>@<our tenant GUID>:true"

ERROR: "Set-PlacesSettings: Status(StatusCode="PermissionDenied", Detail="Entitlement is not allowed to be turned off.")"

I’m stuck at this point. Does anyone happen to know how to resolve this permissions error? Is it just that our opt-in form submission might not have been processed yet? The documentation for Microsoft Places is very thin at this time (because it’s quite new) so I’m not finding much online.

Any ideas appreciated!