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 :)
The differentiation between O365 groups and Outlook groups is interesting, however the fact that you can't create an O365 group without creating an Outlook group seems to kind of kill that differentiation. If I could create an O365 group with no Outlook group, or at creation time select what services I want to go along with the group, I think that would actually make a lot more sense and would reduce confusion. (or who knows, maybe it would make it worse). But the fact that every O365 group gets an Outlook group makes me and everyone else I know think there isn't really a difference. I think that's really what a lot of the complaints about. A better question for the OP might be "When is MS going to kill the O365/Outlook group linkage?".
You can create a Yammer group that uses an Office 365 Group for its membership and identity. And while an Exchange mailbox is created to use for a group calendar, it is not used to store conversations, so it's hardly an "Outlook group". If you choose not to use the Exchange mailbox, you can ignore it (and can hide it so it is never seen in an address list). At that point, who cares? It's just an empty mailbox.
In any case, I think your main point is that it should be possible to nominate the services that you want to use with a group when you create it (or thereafter). I agree with this notion and suggested at this week's Office 365 Admin AMA that it should be possible to edit a group in the Admin Center and select what resources it uses, much like you can select what applications a user can access using a license like E3/E5. I think this is a better way forward.
- David Rosenthal
Microsoft
I agree with the general idea of choosing what you want to use at creation, but I'd slightly change how I'd want it to work.
I'd prefer everything available get spun up at creation, but then the creator chooses what is visible by default and what is hidden until directly requested. This cuts down on the confusion of tool overload and keeps things streamlined, but then also allows these other tools to be instantly available should a team/group directly request them. The way the system works now there can be somewhat of a creation and/or sync delay.
I've seen more than my share of tickets/complaints get logged with our Helpdesk and/or Ops teams due to a user creating something in this Office 365 Group world and immediately trying to access it but receiving errors or some sort of not fully baked experience because the full creation and sync process had not completed yet. This would hopefully eliminate that and leave all tools available to use instantly, but hidden away to keep things clean until needed.
I think a lot of the concerns about tenants/AD getting "messy" will now lessen with the new expiration policies that are currently in preview and will continue to get better over time with more options.
I've been asking for Service Toggles almost since Groups were released. To me, this is the single thing that would instantly clarify the purpose of Groups for all users everywhere. This was my concept, I posted a while back (below).
Group Owners, and tenant admins would have access to do this. Technically provision EVERYTHING, but hide the things that are "disabled" from the UI. Plus you would define admin policies for "what gets turned on by default" based on where a Group is created. So create a Group from Outlook, you start with Package "A". Start it in Yammer, you start with Package "B", start it in PowerBI, you start with Package "C", and so on.
- David Rosenthal
Love this idea! Give power to the admins and the owners/users to leverage the suite of tools how they want, but without overloading them up front. Would make a much more streamlined experience. I think too often those of us who live and breath this world, whether in our own orgs or working at Microsoft itself, forget how confusing some of these things can be to those unfamiliar with everything.
