Forum Discussion
Warning: Provocative post - When is MS going to kill Groups?
I think you have a lot of potential terminology collision going on here that would be best to clarify.
When you're saying Groups, I believe you mean "Outlook Groups" and not "Office 365 Groups". People still confuse these constantly as there has never been good documentation from Microsoft and the shared name is not helping at all.
Office 365 Groups are the membership construct that underpins all the various tools and services in Office 365.
Outlook Groups is the email based communication and collaboration method that attempts to centralize all the tools and services in the Outlook/OWA interface, although not very successfully at this point as you pointed out. These use an Office 365 Group as their membership service to determine who has access.
All three communication methods (Outlook, Teams, and Yammer) use Office 365 Groups as their membership service now. Much of the confusion was created when Office 365 Groups and Outlook Groups were released at the same time and not differentiated at all. This resulted in everyone calling the email based communication method an Office 365 Group, which is not correct.
cfiessinger and Kady Dundas There is still massive confusion about this :)
MicrosoftWhen is MS going to kill Groups?
Short answer: never !!!!.
Continue reading if you want to know why :)
Demystify Office 365 Groups !!
An Office 365 Group is a "container" whose identity is mastered in AAD which could have many resources / workloads associate with it unlike legacy distribution group which could have only single resource i.e. email
Few examples of Office365 groups resources (outlook, msteams, yammer (*conversation resources)), Calendar, Planner, SharePoint Site, Power Bi, NoteBook, CRM, Assignments, etc.
Being a centeralized identity with attributes such as public / private , owner/members/guests, hiddenmembership and others that all O365 workloads understand enables Office365 Group to be really powerful and productive platform for diverse collaboration needs. The new MSGraph api for groups will also allow client to create O365 Groups with different workload configurations and resources.
Outlook Groups was the first consumer of Office365 Groups therefore they were used interchangeably for sometime. When other collaboration experiences such as MSTeams and Yammer opted in for O365 Group for its strength and for the right reasons it got confused by some people as a replacement.
Outlook Groups, MSTeams and Yammer are just different collaboration hubs build on top of Office 365 Group identity and each provide a unique value proposition; and there no single winner !!. It really depends on the end user needs as each platform have different collaboration strengths. Note almost all O365 Connectors work for both Outlook Groups as well as MSTeams.
Teams : Great for realtime chat and AV support, Works well for small teams (in my opinion), modern gestures support and overall fun to use. It could be challenging to follow long threads and search for a thread unless you are @mentioned. Channels compensate for not having subjects but it requires that group members are displined to use right channel. I have seen Channel overload where a single group have 30 channels and it could get hard to follow. On other side Channel to have emails was a good addition for interop across organizations / teams. For private group you cannot @mention external people.
Outlook Groups: Backed by email and easy adoption for existing outlook consumers and DLs. When a new user joins a group he can just see all previous conversations which was not possible with DLs. Threaded conversations are a lot easier to follow. There is no sub folders support but searching is relatively easy if you know what you are looking for, msg from, to , has attachments, etc... Member ability to subscribe to groups enables to stay on top of important groups. In a private outlook group you could still include people to a thread who are not member of the group. Groups is backed by mailbox which have all rich functionailiy of normal mailbox such as sender restrictions, ediscovery, litigiation or inplace hold, etc.
Outlook Groups could futher be broken down into two sub parts
a) Group Mailbox Experience in Outlook
b) Group Mailbox or Group Shard as storage. Group shard is backbone for many resouces such as Delve, Conenctors, and also used by MSTeams and Yammer.
Yammer: Great for large groups, community discussions and was pioneer in social collaboration.
I use all of them.
I agree one of the main challenge have been that each workload call Office 365 groups a local name which for some people was not clear in the begining
Outlook = Outlook Groups
MSTeams = Teams
Yammer = Groups
Sharepoint = TeamSite
Planner = Plan
If you create a new Plan you actually create an Office365 group. If you create Sharepoint TeamSite you actually create an office365 group. Today when you create TeamSite or Plan they choose outlook as the main conversation module. In future that could be configurable based on Organizational and customer needs.
Imran Masud - Thanks that was helpful, and .... I have been creating groups using the new Unified Group commandlet in powershell. This is provisioning an O365 Group right? Is there a way to create an O365 Group that is NOT surfaced in Outlook? In other words, I would like an O365 Group with an instance of MS Teams but I do not want it to display in OWA or the Outlook client. Thanks - Greg
No, when you create a Team, you create an Office 365 Group. You can hide the group from appearing in the Exchange address lists afterwards with PowerShell by running Set-UnifiedGroup -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $True cmdlet, but the group will be there and the Exchange mailbox exists to host a) the team calendar and b) compliance records captured from conversations in the channels belonging to the team.
TonyRedmond - Thanks - When I create a new Team, I have the option of using a O365 Group that I am an owner of. Will the Teams client 'see' the O365 Group if I set -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $True, in other words do I need to run this after I create the Team from my O365 Group?
It seems to me that this commandlet should be run every time you create a O365 group for the express purpose of associating it with a team. Do you recommend this?
- David Rosenthal
One small note for you on your Teams paragraph. Teams actually does allow subjects for new conversations in a Channel. Hit the rich text button and you'll see where you can add them.
My main team has actually found this very valuable and we've set a norm that if you start a new conversation in a Channel, you MUST add a subject. It helps keep things clear and segmented without causing additional Channel sprawl.
