Forum Discussion
Warning: Provocative post - When is MS going to kill Groups?
I think you have a lot of potential terminology collision going on here that would be best to clarify.
When you're saying Groups, I believe you mean "Outlook Groups" and not "Office 365 Groups". People still confuse these constantly as there has never been good documentation from Microsoft and the shared name is not helping at all.
Office 365 Groups are the membership construct that underpins all the various tools and services in Office 365.
Outlook Groups is the email based communication and collaboration method that attempts to centralize all the tools and services in the Outlook/OWA interface, although not very successfully at this point as you pointed out. These use an Office 365 Group as their membership service to determine who has access.
All three communication methods (Outlook, Teams, and Yammer) use Office 365 Groups as their membership service now. Much of the confusion was created when Office 365 Groups and Outlook Groups were released at the same time and not differentiated at all. This resulted in everyone calling the email based communication method an Office 365 Group, which is not correct.
cfiessinger and Kady Dundas There is still massive confusion about this :)
TonyRedmond - Thanks my intention is to remove some confusion for my users. If a team of people commits to using an instance of Microsoft Teams, then I think their experience would be improved if they did not see the Group listed under Groups in Outlook or in OWA. If they do, people will upload files or use the tabs in the Outlook group and wonder why people in the instance of MS Teams don't see the files. Or they will start a conversation that will be ignored by the rest of the Team who are chatting away in an instance of MS Teams.
I've decided to not even discuss the group concept with our users. Rather you create a team site that has xyz functionality + group functionality (distribution list/calendar). Then you can add the Teams interface to that team site if your org so desires. I'm hoping the same will come with Yammer groups. An optional interface that I can connect to my Team sites (secretly) groups. So far this has helped in conversations with users as the group concept was too abstract. It's not 100% clear for them yet, but removing conversations around "groups" has aided in the overall understanding.
- Launching people into new technology without training and guidelines is never a recipe for success. If you want to keep people inside Teams, help them do the right thing with training.
- David Rosenthal
Microsoft
This is usually solved via governance/norms set by the team when they form or communicated to a new joiner to make sure they understand how the existing team collaborates and where things go in what situation.
I would recommend checking out some of the guidance provided by Microsoft itself for Teams - especially the Workshop in the Download section of this page. Starting a team off on the right foot and arming them with the knowledge they need to communicate and collaborate as a team. Leaving them to fend for themselves and trying to solve confusion by removing things is generally going to result in issues or teams going around you and coming up with their own solutions if what they want has been disabled.
