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 :)
They definitely dont need to be killed, but they do need to be "fixed"
Our organization is not "impressed" by Teams, too flashy, but Groups works exactly how we work. I actually wish Microsoft would adopt Groups as a legit collaboration tool (like teams), instead of continually diminishing it as "just a membership service"
Rule #1 of technology: Don't get distracted by marketing.
Rule #2...: The new stuff (like Teams) is always distracting because it is hyped by marketing.
Our organization is not "impressed" by Teams, too flashy, but Groups works exactly how we work.
This statement is true of many organizations who have moved from on-premises Exchange to Office 365. In the on-premises world, Outlook is king of the hill and the integration of Groups into Outlook is pretty good. Outlook Groups (or Office 365 Groups that use Exchange to store conversations) are important to the overall success of Office 365, simply because so many people use the client.
The weakness of Teams is perhaps not that it is too flashy (UIs can be tweaked). Rather, the evident flaws in email support, external users, poor search, and lack of full support for the range of compliance technology now available inside Office 365 are more pertinent reasons for organizations to pause in their deployment. On the other hand, Office 365 Groups have great email functionality, have their content fully indexed and searchable, support external access, and support most (but not all) of the new data governance framework. So they have a lot going for them.
TR
- David Rosenthal
Microsoft
This is part of the point of this thread, and why I keep politely poking Kady and Christophe. Office 365 Groups IS a membership service. Outlook Groups, or Groups for Outlook, or whatever it is actually called, is a communication medium for users to select from. They get to choose Email, Teams, or Yammer, and Office 365 Groups takes care of membership and connecting everything together.
See if this helps everyone: https://twitter.com/cfiessinger/status/884833139004063744
Outlook Groups, or Groups for Outlook, or whatever it is actually called, is a communication medium for users to select from.
Rather, Outlook Groups is the most functional and feature-rich of any of the collaboration applications available inside Office 365 today. Yammer is more scalable but less functional. Teams is the new kid on the block and needs work to meet the requirements of many enterprises. All the other applications that use Groups as a convenient mechanism for membership management Stream, Power BI, and Planner do so in the full knowledge that the membership service is a tad flawed because of its lack of granularity in access control. In fact, what is talked about as a membership service is really just a thin layer on top of Azure Active Directory group objects.
