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 :)
I doubt MS will ever kill Groups, (most corporations seem loathe to admit they might have made any kind of mistake), but I have a feeling we'll see a name change or two at the very least.
Or company is slowly migrating to O365, and the confusion around when to use Teams vs when to use Groups vs when to use regular SP sites, (remember those?), is causing us no end of problems. To make it worse we are in a hybrid environment, with "almost" everything of a "group" nature being handled by our Service Desk through AD. They create all Distribution Lists and Security Groups, and make sure that all policies and naming conventions get followed.
Now all of that is out the window. We have users creating Groups and Teams willy-nilly. I I have multiple groups with almost the exact same name, and I (as admin) don't have any idea which is the correct one, or what exactly is in that site. At least on my 75 on premises SP servers I can easily log into a SP site and see exactly what is on that site. Not with groups, (or at least any way I have found).
We are now looking at completely restricting the use of Groups and Teams until MS get's this mess sorted out. MS says they use this all through the company, and that's all well and good for them, but for our users it's just a confused mess.
Ted
Now all of that is out the window. We have users creating Groups and Teams willy-nilly. I I have multiple groups with almost the exact same name, and I (as admin) don't have any idea which is the correct one, or what exactly is in that site.
This is precisely the scenario that I and some other MVPs warned Microsoft would happen when they briefed us about Office 365 Groups in Redmond in November 2014. Those of us who had been down the path of public folders and the uncontrolled sprawl that resulted when users were allowed to create public folders without let or hindrance forecast that the same would occur with Groups. Microsoft's response at the time was that they wanted users to control the creation of groups so that collaboration could flow without administrators or IT departments deciding what should happen. It was complete ill-smelling brown bovine material at the time and it is the same today. No sensible tenant operates without a group creation policy that restricts the right to create groups to a small set of people who might actually understand what they are doing. Yes, this impacts Teams, Planner, Stream, and so on, but it is the only reasonable approach to group management.
I am sincerely sorry that your tenant has gotten into such a mess. I wish that every tenant came complete with a fully-functional group creation policy, but I guess I am less collaborative than Microsoft would like me to be...