Forum Discussion
Ability to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups is coming later this year
- May 18, 2017
Hi all - yes our plan is to provide the ability to connect only root site collections to new Office 365 Groups. We've considered enabling subsite-to-group connections, but there are enough gotchas both architecturally as well as from a design standpoint in delivering an experience that is comprehensible to most humans. One example is that when we start rolling out classification-based policy (e.g. Confidential classification equates to group guests being disabled, SharePoint external sharing turned off, etc. - this is just an example for discussion), those policies apply at the site collection container level. If we enabled subsite connection to groups, we would have to deal with site parent-child policy conflicts, inheritance-based permissions, etc. Not saying it's impossible but cleary stands in the way of shipping an experience sooner.
Having looked at all site collections in the service, the vast majority are flat (i.e. no subwebs), for which this experience should work seamlessly. That said, we acknowledge that there are some very active site collections with subsite hierarchies. For these subwebs, there are a couple of paths to get to 'modern'. One is a migration effort from subsite to root site collection, and then connecting the collection to a new group with the feature described in this thread. The other, is a 'modernize this site' type of experience that brings the classic subsite to the modern experiences without a group connection. This is also a body of work we are investing in and will share additional details in the future.
Hope this helps to clarify. We'll definitely be talking more about this in the coming months as we make progress on the feature.
Thanks
I've read over and over again that subsites are not recommended for Groups and their modern sites. For most collections that use subsites, how will "Groupification," affect those subsites? Are there any issues we should expect to see for any corresponding subsite? I am concerned that groupification will negatively impact collection subsites.
- Tejas MehtaApr 24, 2018Microsoft
Hi Liana,
If a site collection has subsites, you can still connect the top-level site collection to a new Office 365 Group. This process does not change anything structurally to the subsite hierarchy - all site resources will continue to have the same permissions they did prior to the group connection, including subsites.
The main thing to be aware of is that the new Office 365 Group's identity claims will be added to the site collection's SP permission groups (i.e. group owners claim will be added to the site owners permission group, and group members claim to the site members permission group), so if subsites have inherited permissions from the root, the group owners and members will have the appropriate permissions there. If permissions inheritance was broken and the SP groups for site owners and members were removed, then the side effect you would see is that anyone added to the Office 365 group's owners or members would not have access to the site.
Hope this helps.
Tejas
LianaJohnson wrote:
I've read over and over again that subsites are not recommended for Groups and their modern sites. For most collections that use subsites, how will "Groupification," affect those subsites? Are there any issues we should expect to see for any corresponding subsite? I am concerned that groupification will negatively impact collection subsites.