Forum Discussion
When to use O365 Groups - is the Intranet dead?
Thank you for posting the video. Very interesting discussion about intranets. Nine months ago we went through an intranet scoping phase, and the result was going to be a $250k intranet project which we just could not stomach. It seemed like overkill for 150 person organization. The idea of Groups being formed for teams in an organic way makes sense, and then use a less robust intranet for the "source of truth" type documents. However, your point in the panel discussion about managing the "source of truth" is where I'm stuck now, and what prompted my post. A marketing team working together in a Group for a campaign, is going to create and collaborate on documents for that campaign. With the Intranet "source of truth", they are going to have to remember to copy the final versions from their Group, to the intranet for all to consume. Then any changes will be difficult to manage in both spots.
Geoffrey Bronner, I think you’re right that for groups like IT, I’m probably overthinking it. We can create separate content areas depending on the function. For instance, I can create a Group for private IT docs, and Sharepoint Site with a library for IT training docs for general consumption (I’m still not sure if I would create a site collection or a subsite on the main, but I can experiment). It is the cross functional teams like marketing that will have documents in multiple locations that worries me.
You could instantiate a link to the Group document into the Intranet.
In such a way, all updates to the document will automatically be visible in the Intranet without any additional effort...
I'm not sure this would be feasible for lots of documents. Permissions would need to be modified for access outside of the group, plus the Group members would have to understand how to post the links to the documents instead of the documents themselves. Thats why I had considered webparts to consume the public content on an "intranet" page, but permissions are still a problem, and content query templates are a pain! It doesn't seem that MS is designing things to consume Group content from other Site collections - For instance, the new Library web part for modern sites can't search other site collections/groups.
Perhaps permissions are not so difficult to set up...
If the Group is public, then "Everyone except external users" is already member of the Group.
If the Group is private, then it is enough to share the document with "Everyone except external users".
Also, you can easily find Link as a choice under New...
- Salvatore, so is it your opinion that all documents belong in an O365 group, and that team intranet pages would just have links to those documents? A fairly typical example is Corporate Policies - they need to be consumed by the entire organization, but worked on by a smaller subset of users. Would you create a O365 for "corporate policies" and create a link to every document on the intranet? How would you name the group? Would you add a prefix in some way to separate it from the user created groups? In a few years, how would I know whether "corporate policies" is a critical asset library or just thrown together by a few people to work on something for a week?