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 :)
Not too provocative imo :) I wrote about Teams being a good interface for O365 Groups back in March ;) (http://www.techmikael.com/2017/03/context-to-function-function-to-context.html)
To me it's not a problem. O365 Groups will back many offerings, and you pick the UI most suitable to you. If that is Teams, then fine, or it could be some other 3rd party portal app, and Insort of see Teams as a third party app, as it happens to use O365 Groups and adds more in their "portal" UI.
So yes, the oob Groups UI is confusing at times, but it is what it is and won't be killed any time soon. I think perhaps the Yammer UI might turn into a nice experience as well on top of Groups.
I very much doubt that any appetite exists for an axe to be taken to Outlook Groups for the very good reasons that:
1. Outlook is still the most important desktop client in the world of Exchange. Having Groups in Outlook gives people a collaboration platform in the client that they use.
2. Teams is lousy at email. Even when external access comes, I suspect that the free and open nature of SMTP-based email will allow email to continue in its predominant role in partner communications.
3. Ditto Yammer.
4. And back to email again, 10 million users of Outlook Groups is a lot of people. Ok, that's still only 10% of Office 365 MAU, but it's a lot. https://www.petri.com/microsoft-crusade-office-365-groups
As others have pointed out here, Groups the service is just that (flawed and imperfect, but very usable). The implementations of collaboration applications built on top of Groups will serve individual needs for different companies and allows Microsoft to have answers where other companies do not. For these and other reasons too boring to go into here, I don't see Outlook Groups hitting the buffers anytime soon.