Hello from the Office 365 Groups Engineering Team

Personally I am struggling to understand when you would use Groups over a team site over a Yammer group.

I was under the impression creating a Group would create a team site and a TeamSite would create a group (moving forward). I also understand that Groups are simply a SP team site dumbed down that also takes a little of other features from Office 365.

In order for me to be fully sold on groups I want to know where groups will be in 6 months time. Will they be fully fledged team sites with SPO feature set or are they going to be there own entity completely. Issue being silo'd information and how content can flow from Group to TeamSites so content is surfaced through aggregation or search.

We need a way to have quick creation of areas for collaboration on a team level (Co-Authoring, conversations, etc) then a way to make that flow to a Global area (Global INtranet made of Team sites) for the consumption across the Organisation. My first thoughts were Teamsites at a Global level, then below the Team site with a Yammer group attached etc giving the conversation function through the Yammer embedd/App on phones. Then by simply having a IA implemented using that and Approval workflows to push content up.

I would love to hear any input the community can give me, I am all ears because I really want this to work based on the Business Requreiments and not what we want the Business to use (Technology lead). Althouh Office 365 is the Platform we are going to use or already using :).

Many thanks and I look forward to your constructive feedback.

We are working to get Guest Access available to all customers with First Release option by September 1st. There are few things in our internal processes that we need to close on before we can confirm that date however, so the data might change.