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
cfiessinger - I'm surprised more tenancies aren't making use of sub-sites. We followed our same onPrem architecture of creating a few top level site collections and then creating multiple site collections under them. The ability to connect a Group to a Sub-Site is going to be critical to our business given the subsites in the structure of PPPM ( Portfolio, Programme, Project management) processes we follow.
Is this something Microsoft are considering, on their roadmap?
We also did it this way to work within the 2,000 subsite per site collection limit, while also maximising our protection from the 500,000 limit of site collections per tenancy.
Any advice / guidance - greatly appreciated
Tejas MehtaHi Graham, thanks for your feedback. At present we don't have plans to enable connection of subsites to Office 365 Groups. There are numerous hurdles and technical complexities we'd need to overcome, e.g. how do you treat group privacy or external guest access to parent (or child) sites that have been connected to groups themselves or how would users of other group workloads (e.g. mailbox) expect to interact with parent/child resources outside of SharePoint? Implementing the corresponding constraints and representing them in a way that site owners can interpret meaningfully in our interface is a challenging task.
Out of curiosity - are you anywhere near 500k site collections in your tenant, or foresee breaking through that number?
Thanks,
Tejas
Thank you for such a quick response.
That is a real problem for us. I appreciate some of the challenges that you have flagged.
In our specific case, the permission inheritance aspects are not such a big deal. We've architected our sites and sub-sites this way more so for the IA aspects rather than the permission inheritance, i.e. we make more use of Site Collection Content Types, Site Columns etc, so that each set of sub-sites pull from their specific set of common js and css etc.
I guess, what we want to know is that. In the Groups interface can change the link behind the Files and Notebook links?
and future in Teams - change the Files link or remove it so we can add our own Files link.
To answer your question. Right now, do to Self-Services site creation process we have over 2,000 sites collection. However, we are planning to link our solution to automate the creation of these sub-sites based on business rules in our Enterprise Data Warehouse, so when a Job or Lead reaches a particular business state the tools like, the SharePoint site, Group calendar/email etc.. and permissions to them are provisioned, so that they are available at the time of when they needed. We will be testing this with one part of our business this year which will result in a run rate of around 1,000 sites a month, and if successful we will look to expand this for more of the business. So the numbers will grow faster early next year.
- We're also not going to benefit much from the ability to convert site collections, we definitely need the ability to convert subsites, else we're going to have to do a heck of a lot of migration.
