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.
MicrosoftHi 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
ChristineStack we've started doing what Tejas Mehta mentioned and bought a migration tool to just move existing content into newly created Group sites (root site collections).
im super suprised to hear the stats on the subsites, weve done quite a lot and even more since the expansion of site collection sizes. we typically had one SC for projects, one for workgroups, one for each operating company, etc. in any case it is painfully clear information architecture is dead, might as well embrace it 😀
for us the migrations arent too painful, though we dont have a lot of complexity in the sites we are migrating (eg no workflows etc)
Brent - do you mind giving the name of the migration tool that you bought?
- Its not dead. Its just "time consuming" for Microsoft to do it properly. Point and case of how broken Microsoft's SharePoint multi-tenant service is.
This is dissapointing. This still means there is a large migration process in the future for us if we ever want to start using groups or teams in our org.
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
Are there any plans to connect pre-team site SharePoint Online sites to O365 Groups?
- We are SharePoint Online ONLY. Each regional office has a site collection with departments and projects as subsites. It is the subsites that we need connected to 0365 groups and that cannot be done. There is also a Committees site collection that has people from each regional office and all sites have a global nav.
- cfiessingerChristine there is no automatic upgrade mechanism to convert security groups to Office 365 Groups.
Can you convert security groups to 0365 groups with powershell?
- 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. 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
- how?
