Is it possible to change the ownership of an existing site by setting a Microsoft Entra group as the new site owner ?

[emassone-coreview]

Hello, I'm new to SharePoint and the Pnp.Core library.

I'm trying to perform the following actions:

1. create a new site of kind communication site
2. change the owner of the site, assigning a Microsoft Entra group as the new owner of the site.

This is the code I'm using to do that:

using var pnpContext = await _pnpContextFactory.CreateAsync("SiteToWorkWith");

await pnpContext.Me.LoadAsync();

var uri = new Uri("https://my-tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/pnp-test");

var options = new CommunicationSiteOptions(uri, title: "pnp-test")
{
  Description = "Pnp Test",
  Language = Language.English,
  Owner = pnpContext.Me.Mail
};

using var newSiteContext = await pnpContext.GetSiteCollectionManager().CreateSiteCollectionAsync(options);

var siteProperties = await pnpContext.GetSiteCollectionManager().GetSiteCollectionPropertiesAsync(newSiteContext.Uri);

// change the owner and point to a group
siteProperties.Owner = "1a985e8f-4e74-4549-952f-5b077750782f"; // group object id 

try
{
  await siteProperties.UpdateAsync();
}
catch (Exception exception)
{
  _logger.LogError(exception, "Error updating site properties: {Error}", exception.Message);
}

If i try to do this I got the following exception:

PnP.Core.CsomServiceException: 'CSOM service exception'

Stacktrace:

   at PnP.Core.Services.BatchClient.ProcessCsomBatchResponse(CsomBatch csomBatch, String batchResponse, HttpStatusCode statusCode, Dictionary`2 headers)
   at PnP.Core.Services.BatchClient.<ExecuteCsomBatchAsync>d__63.MoveNext()
   at PnP.Core.Services.BatchClient.<ExecuteBatch>d__37.MoveNext()
   at PnP.Core.Model.BaseDataModel`1.<RequestAsync>d__96.MoveNext()
   at PnP.Core.Model.BaseDataModel`1.<RawRequestAsync>d__98.MoveNext()
   at PnP.Core.Admin.Model.SharePoint.SiteCollectionManagement.<UpdateSiteCollectionPropertiesAsync>d__7.MoveNext()
   at PnP.Core.Admin.Model.SharePoint.SiteCollectionProperties.<UpdateAsync>d__257.MoveNext()
   at SharepointTest.Worker.<ExecuteAsync>d__3.MoveNext() in C:\my-code\SharepointTest\SharepointTest\Worker.cs:line 42

Error.Message:

The login name 1a985e8f-4e74-4549-952f-5b077750782f was not found in the tenant.

Here I have used fictious Tenant name and group id; in my real testing setup I have already verified that my Tenant do contains a group having the object id I'm using for my test. So, I'm sure that a group with that id exists in the Tenant.

Is this a known limitation of the library (not being able to assign a group as the primary admin of the site ? What I noticed is that if I try to do the very same operation from the UI of the SharePoint admin center it works fine.

Thanks for helping.