Forum Discussion
What to do when you dont necessarily want a Group?
I'm still concerned about some of the approaches being discussed (every site gets a group and every group gets a site). It seems there will be lots of unwanted sharepoint sites and o365 groups sitting out there, worried about content sprawl (now not only in the cloud, but sprawling into user's Outlook).
- Will there be a way to disable the SharePoint site if a group is created?
- Will there be a way to disable the O365 Group is a SharePoint site is created?
- Can you change the Groups permissions on the SharePoint site - like the Group only has Read access to the actuall Group SharePoint Site, or it could be removed all together technically?
I'd really like to see the ability for O365 Groups to have a checklist of services you want activated / deactivated (by services I mean SharePoint, Planner, Notebook)
Maybe you want a Group strictly for discussion and internal doc library, but no sharepoint, no planner, etc.
Maybe you want a Group strictly for Planner, but nothing else.
Maybe you want a SharePoint site for a document management solution, that has no need for a Group at all
Everything on and provisioned by default seems like too much to me...
15 Replies
good points!
We are looking to replace the old style distributuion groups with the new fancy groups feature and tehn all these questions pop up. One reason for doing thsi is to have an easy way delegate membership administration and for users to opt-in and out of groups. we want users to share some information in a simple way but we do not necessarily want to mange yet another "place" for storing files.
So as you said, can we disable functionality in the Group in some way? Can we get a Group creation wizard where we can select what type of group this is?
Anyone?
Mats
We are also struggling with groups and the lack of controls in managing them. From what we see, the tenant admin does not have control to manage / view the SharePoint site created by the group and there doesn't seem to be an easy way evaluate the controls and permisssions on what is stored.
Tejas MehtaMicrosoft
Hi Brent, some responses inline:
Will there be a way to disable the SharePoint site if a group is created?
- Will there be a way to disable the O365 Group is a SharePoint site is created? [TM] It will still be possible to create SharePoint site collections that are not connected to an Office 365 Group if that is what you require
- Can you change the Groups permissions on the SharePoint site - like the Group only has Read access to the actuall Group SharePoint Site, or it could be removed all together technically? [TM] We are currently building a simplified group site permissions UX that will allow group (site) owners to change the permission level for group members in the site (e.g. from Edit to Read Only). From this experience we will also provide a way to get to the 'classic' SharePoint site permissions page where you can do more advanced role/permission mapping. We're still working through some of the details and will share more in the coming weeks.
There isn't currently a UX that allows for the selective turning on or off of specific workloads within an Office 365 group though. Good feedback for us to consider, however.
- I totally agree! Mark Driver put all of my concerns in writing!
Yep pretty much agree here as well. We have questions oustanding re Groups:-
- Will the groups that are automatically created for existing team sites be public or private?
- Will site owners automatically be granted Owner permissions on a Group?
- Will these Groups be hidden from the GAL automatically?
- Will the members of the team site be notified by Microsoft of the groups creation?
- What happens in the event that a group already exists with the same name as a team site?
- Will we get any notification from MS when they decide to implement this in our tenant?
- We currently have a different naming convention for Distribution Groups than we do for Office Groups. Will MS provide us with any scripts to help us find and rename any newly created groups from team sites, which will obviously not match our current naming convention?
- As each group will also have a Plan, will we have to turn these licenses on for each user, now that we have disabled them?
This is a nightmare for Office 365 admins in a big envrionment.
Mark
- Tejas Mehta
Hi Mark, I'll reply to the SharePoint related questions in your list and have forwarded the rest on to others that should hopefully be able to chime in.
- Will the groups that are automatically created for existing team sites be public or private?
[TM] During the provisioning flow for a site, users will have an option to select the privacy setting for the group.
- Will site owners automatically be granted Owner permissions on a Group?
[TM] When a group connected site is created from SharePoint, the group's owners (a claim from AAD) is set to be the Site owners of the SharePoint site collection.
- Will the members of the team site be notified by Microsoft of the groups creation?
[TM] Members get notified of the group creation in the same way they do for groups created elsewhere (e.g. Outlook) with a welcome email that includes links to different resources.
- What happens in the event that a group already exists with the same name as a team site?
[TM] There is a check that is made in the creation flow and the user will be notified if there is a naming conflict and to edit the name.
- Will we get any notification from MS when they decide to implement this in our tenant?
[TM] We communicate upcoming changes like this via Office 365 message center
- Will the groups that are automatically created for existing team sites be public or private?
Is that already being rolled out? I find no way to create a group for exisiting team sites currently.
I agree Mark Driver with all of your points.
BTW, no need to worry about the Planner license -- that license option literally only controls whether your users see the tile in the apps launcher. It does not prevent them from accessing Planner, as long as they know the URL. (We discovered this via a support ticket last week! The Microsoft Support Engineer pointed to the official documentation on this -- https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/brismith/2016/06/24/microsoft-plannerdisabling-planner-license-without-enabling-other-licenses/.)
I have these concerns myself. They're all valid and I hope we'll get proper answers at ignite.
That said there will still be the ability to create normal site collections without the groups connection going forward. This creation is strictly controlled by IT so you can still have a robust primary site collection(s) with good information architecture design and governance.
However if that "new" button in the SharePoint site becomes a quick and easy way for users to create groups/sites as they like there will very quickly be massive sprawl concerns without some very basic reporting functionality to monitor and maintain (I'm thinking here a 1 click report that shows created groups/sites with no actions in 6 months)
Thank you Brent, I dont know why it has angered me so much but I feel that Microsoft is actively choosing to totally ignore any kind of corporate governance for sites and groups here. There are enterprise level customers that have controls on this kind of stuff in place and they just dont care that this is going to disrupt and change the way corporate governance of these workloads works.
I'm thinking along the same lines Robert. My team is tasked with managing SharePoint/OneDrive and I'm often caught flat footed no matter how much I try to keep up (reading the message center and blogs daily, monitoring the old Yammer network and this new one daily, etc.).
The current model of rolling out everything with few controls and enabled by default works great (I suppose) for small businesses that don't have an IT shop. However, my 40k+ user organization expects more change control options.
Totally agree. I can see where users will create and quickly forget they even have the group, so it won't get used as intended.
- I definitively agree with your concerns and also the need of providing granular controls to be able to set up a good governance in place when creating Groups or Modern Team Sites
