Forum Discussion
MicrosoftAbility to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups is coming later this year
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
Wait...site collections. That would be no good. Our site collections are per regional office and our subsites are departments. We NEED to be able to connect an 0365 group to a sub-site. Please clarify Microsoft.
You might try mapping Channels from Teams to the sub-webs of your Site (site collection).
Team, Group, and Site are all a one-to-one relationship. Probably best we keep it that way or we might all go mad. So for example, if "Products" is the subject matter, then there's one Team / Group / Site called Products.
However, there is a one-to-many relationship between a Team and its sub-Channels.
And there's a one-to-many between a Site (site collection) and its sub-Webs.
So you can create a Channel (sub-Team, so to speak) for each sub-Web (sub-Site). Then add a tab in the Channel that connects to the corresponding sub-web, and put a link back to the corresponding Channel from the left nav (Quick Launch) of the sub-web. The Channels then map the augmented functionality for conversations etc. to the sub-webs on one-to-one basis.
So for each actual product sub-Web (Grommet, Rivet, Bracket, etc.) you might have below the Products Site, there's a corresponding Channel (Grommet, Rivet, Bracket, etc.) below the Products Team.
I'm just waiting for the programmatical interface to Teams to become available before setting up some automation provisioning whereby the associated Channels are created automatically from the sub-Webs. This will work for Customers, Suppliers, Employees, as well as Products, where the one-to-many-ness abounds.
- This wouldn't work for us. We have a handful of site collections all of which have hundreds of subsites under them. Because there's no way to set permissions per channel, everyone would be able to see everyone's conversations etc.
There's a user voice for that one, and MS are apparently working on it: -
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_o365admin-mso_teams-mso_o365b/microsoft-teams-member-access-permissions-to/bd9e1050-70de-47a4-bbb1-Mmm, that's 01d6edb182e6
Hopefully whatever users / groups / permissions functionality MS put into Teams for Channels it will have an API too. Then we can code something to sync permissions between the SP sub-Webs to the corresponding Channel. For example, the SP sub-Web Members group syncs its membership to the corresponding Channel's "group" (or whatever they call groups in the users / groups / permissions functionality for Teams and Channels) thereby granting permissions to the conversation for the Channel only to the members of the SP sub-Web's members group.
Tejas MehtaHi 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
Hi,
If there is a need to add existing O365 groups to Sharepoint subsites, there is always the possiblity to grant access to the AD Seurity group equivalent of the O365 group via the site's SharePoint group.
- Sorry, but I'm not following you here: can you elaborate what you mean? You can add Office 365 Groups to your SPO Subsites security configuration with no problems
- Hi Tejas,
You say "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." would it be just as easy to create a group and then migrate the data from old team site to the new group? Are there any disadvantages to this over your suggested method? I understand that site collections created using my suggested method won't appear in the site collection list for administrators, but I believe this is on the way anyway.
Thanks. Tejas Mehta,
I really apreciate the quick answer. Not exactly what I was hoping since we have many subsites but at least we know where we are moving to. I am that we will leave the current structure "as is" create new 0365 modern sites and just put a hyperlink to the old subsites sites.
It is very easy to convert a DL to an 0365 group but all our permissioning and mailing lists are mail-enabled security groups. Is it easy to convert those to 0365 groups?
Christine
- cfiessingerChristine there is no automatic upgrade mechanism to convert security groups to Office 365 Groups.
