Forum Discussion
ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages
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
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?
Yeah it does, because I want to add Content Types and Site Columns at the time of provisioning and before members start uploading documents. I do not want users to have to click the files link to have the site collection provisioned.
At present I would need to manually click the files link then add the CTypes and Columns.
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.
- That is great to hear. In our case, we're specifically designing our solution around the simplest possible permissions structure, as in having a single security group containing the members that would have access to a given SharePoint site. This is explicitly to make it work as much as o365 groups in the hope of being able to connect to an o365 group down the road with as little work as possible. For us, the option of being able to "upgrade" an existing site so that it could have a connected o365 group, thereby removing any and all custom peromissions, would be a very small problem. Of course I am aware that this probably doesn't apply to everyone, but perhaps it could be rolled out in such a fashion to begin with?
LincolnDeMaris wrote:
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.This has to be a non-starter if you are wanting to do it automated across the board.
There are soooo many reason why every site doesnt need an O365 Group.
In our environment, I could justify a need maybe for 25% of our sites, and that is being generous. Everything else is set up with very specific permissions in mind like you said.
If there is some kind of manual way to create a O365 Group for a Site, or apply an existing O365 Group, or multiple groups to an existing site, then I could get behind that.
I would much rather migrate my stuff from an existing SP Site to an O365 Group+SP Site (as the need arose) than have billions of orphaned/not needed Groups and Sites sitting out there that I didnt want in the first place.
