Forum Discussion
ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages
Today marks the beginning of bringing the full power of SharePoint to Office 365 Groups, with additional benefits to SharePoint Online all up! New and existing groups will get modern team sites, which come with an updated Home page, the ability to pin items within the new Quick links web part, and to see what's going on in the site via the new Activity web part.
These team sites within Office 365 Groups, and existing team sites throughout SharePoint Online, will also have the ability to create publishing pages - fast, easy to author pages that support rich multimedia content, and look great on mobile browsers and via the SharePoint mobile app. Get ready to communicate and share your ideas within SharePoint like never before.
Additionally, Microsoft will increase the site collection limit in SharePoint Online to "up to 25TB" (previously "up to 1TB); this will be refelcted in an update to the official "SharePoint Online boundaries and limits" support article.
Please review the associated blog on blogs.office.com, "New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups" with numerous links to new and updated support.office.com articles.
Let us know what you think,
Mark
207 Replies
- We currently have modern doc libs and lists disabled (as they break customization and the top menus are too wonky for us right now), will that prevent this from rolling out to us (first release whole org)?
LincolnDeMarisMicrosoft
Nope! If you have modern lists and libraries turned off, you'll still get this change. When you navigate to the team site associated with a group, you'll be able to create and use lists and libraries there, and they'll use the classic UI as you'd expect.Then the question would be: Will the new Home page and the new Publishing pages "break" the branding of a team site, like the new document libraries have done?
It shouldn't; not during this phase, as it applies only to new and existing groups - which only have had the Files portion enabled (aka, the modern document library) for the Group. If you are using Office 365 Groups, you'll soon see "Site" added to the groups apps list. This is a new site for the group; not an existing team site. And going forward, when you create a new group, here too you would get a new, modern team site for the group.
In the future we do want to enable the choice for existing team sites to have the new home page applied as the default home page. And we are concious of configuration and extensibility requirements. We'll have more to share at the Ignite 2016 timeframe.
Hope that helps for now,
Mark
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?
- Adding to this, is how to recognise whether this is an officially provisioned team site or a user provisioned group team site?
Mark-Kashman If we have disabled user self-service site creation, then will it affect the groups-connected-site creation as well?
- LincolnDeMaris
Joe, are you asking if if all team sites that exist today will end up looking like brand new team site + groups provisioned in the new way?
We won’t ever replace your existing customized classic pages with modern pages. We want to offer the new homepage as an option, especially for team sites that haven’t customized their homepage. We don’t have a plan for “upgrading” or “converting” classic pages with classic web parts into modern pages – that’s upgrading content and is basically impossible. You can always create a modern page inside any team site, put the Quick links and Activity web parts on it, and enjoy the benefits of the new homepage :)
"Modern team sites” aren't a radically new thing. They’re just team sites, with more and more of the apps inside sporting new modern experiences – homepage, pages, documents, lists, site contents, and more coming. Every team site that exists today is a “modern team site” because of the modern experiences we’ve already shipped.
- Hi Lincoln,
My sites aren't highly customized beyond some web parts I don't even need. Some of my templated sites are already using the modern libraries and lists, but I like the new "modern" home page to bring the look and navigation together. Right now, the home page (and settings pages) look completely different from the lists and libraries. I'd like to stop that.
Further, I'm rebuilding all my sites right now (I'm about a year into our rollout, and have learned a lot / need to adapt). What I really need is the ability to generate the full "modern" build including home page. If that includes creating a group, I'll create a group. No problem there. I think there just needs to be more documentation as to what is changing, what is staying the same, and what paths (SharePoint Admin, Subsites, O365 Groups) lead to the same place.
Thanks.
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.
