Forum Discussion
ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages
This is great news. I just want to know the following, as I tweeted at Jeff Teper earlier.
Hey https://twitter.com/jeffteper/ when the full rollout of modern team sites occurs, will there be any difference between a previous SP Team Site + New Group?
At a platform level, both new and existing team sites are the same. The main difference is that team + groups comes with the new home page, the Quick Links and Activity modern web parts and the integration with Office 365 Groups for Files and Site within the apps Office 365 Groups provides membership to (the others being Conversations, Calendar, Notebook, Planner, etc.).
We are working at wiring up all Groups entry points - the big one for us is the SharePoint home, where you create a new subsite today, soon you will generate a unique site collection connected to Office 365 Groups. This is already in place for other entry points - like from within Outlook.
It is still possible to create a default team site from the Sharepoint Online admin center. These wouldn't have a connection to Office 365 Groups.
At the Ignite 2016 conference (end of Spet.2016), we'll have more to share for what it means for existing team sites to add access and control with Office 365 Groups membership, plus bringing the new home page and modern web parts.
Thanks,
Mark
- Great answer. I still have a couple of questions though. If we decide to go with Team Sites now, will we ever be able to connect those to some corresponding Office 365 Groups? I mean will we be forever locked to that decision? If so that would make us wait and see before we create any team sites for now.
AllanWith exactly the situation I am in now. I need all the functionality of Groups, I love them. But I use Team Sites because I need the ability to add Content Types and Site Columns specifically. Now you can add both of these to the Groups Library but.....
When a Group is provisioned the Site Collection for that Group is not provisioned until someone clicks on the Files Link. After someone click the files link then the Site Collection is spun up and you can add CTypes and Columns.
If there was a way to provision the Group Site Collection at the time the Group is created then that be be brilliant, and I can do away with Team Sites all together.
If the site collection is created at the time of Group creation, or at the time of first use, what is the meaningful difference? If it's there when you try to use it, does it matter when it was created?
LincolnDeMarisMicrosoft
We are thinking about how to enable connecting groups to existing sites. It's a very interesting scenario - no ETA, but we're thinking hard about it. The hardest part is figuring out how to reconcile the very simple concept of group membership having access to everything in the group, and potentially very complex permission structures in existing sites.- The implementation of permissions in SharePoint is a nightmare of your own creation. Good luck.
Appreciate the blog post/update, and the replies here Mark-Kashman
>SharePoint home, where you create a new subsite today
>still possible to create a default team site from the Sharepoint Online admin centerIn both of the above what is created is a Site Collection. I know it's sort of a nit-pick if you're using high-level terminology, but it's also true that for many of us that's an important detail/difference. I hope that the language in the Ignite materials were be precise in this respect.
>SharePoint home, where you create a new subsite today
I'd be curious if you have any stats on how many companies have disabled that (we have). Though I suspect many of us will un-disable it since self-creation with Groups amounts to the same effect. :smileyhappy:
FYI for "up to Today":
1. "create site" creates a subsite in an IT-chosen site collection; unless they developed a custom solution to do otherwise (there is a custom solution in GitHub that does this :-)).
2. New private site collection created from within SPO admin center = unique, new site collection.
And "tomorrow" when you "create site" from SharePoint home, it'll be a new site collection for the Group, primarily exposed via "Files" and "Site" from the group nav.
Hi Mark,
for those of us who have created a custom solution to create sites from the + Create site link in the now SharePoint (previously Sites) page, will that still be supported in the future?
Will there be any support for the same when creating Groups/Team Sites?
We have create the custom solution so that we limit the number of people who can create sites via our application and also so we can add value to the sites by configuring them and also allowing us to add data classification, ownership and auditing etc. Will this type of scenario be catered for in the future for team sites and for groups?
So Mark-Kashman, does this mean then that we can now provision Content Types and Site Columns to Office 365 Groups? Also any new on the Branding side of things?
Under the covers it's a full-powered SharePoint team site - so yes. And no news on branding beyond the new look & feel of the home page for Office 365 Groups team sites. We're thinking in this area with a few things to share at Ignite 2016 timeframe.
