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Mark-Kashman's avatar
Mark-Kashman
Former Employee
Jan 09, 2017

UPDATE: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups moving beyond First Release

As announced in August, 2016, we are bringing SharePoint Online team sites to Office 365 groups. This change rolled out to First Release tenants in the end of 2016 and is now beginning worldwide roll...
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Cyrus Christian's avatar
Cyrus Christian
Brass Contributor
Jan 26, 2017

I've been tring to create secondary libraries and the navigation is not consitant.  Its a complete show stop issue for our work so we have to give up on Office 365 Groups until there is a consitant navigation and branding.

Bruce Weatherford's avatar
Bruce Weatherford
Brass Contributor
Jan 26, 2017
I am also frustrated at the lack of consistent navigation given it's so easy to get lost, especially how hard groups are being pushed!
  • Mark-Kashman's avatar
    Mark-Kashman
    Former Employee
    Jan 26, 2017
    Always interested in UI/UX deeback. Can you be more specific to the areas where you get lost? Navigating within SharePoint, or from app to app - i.e. shared calendar to group's files?

    - Mark
    • Brent Ellis's avatar
      Brent Ellis
      Silver Contributor
      Jan 26, 2017

      That is easy:

      • In SharePoint it is not intuitive to find the other products (the link to go back to Group conversations is there), but trying to find the Group calendar, or Files tab, or planner - you have to click the site title for the navigation box to show up
      • In the Calendar, sometimes you end up just looking at the calendar and lose the actual Groups navigation
      • In the Notebook, you can only go back to the SharePoint site, not anything else, so you end up making multiple hops if you want to go from one to another
      • Outlook is missing Planner
      • In SharePoint, if you click on the "Files" option it takes you to the Shared Documents library, NOT the new Files tab
      • In SharePoint, no option to navigate to Planner
      • There is no solid entry point to Groups - having an interface that shows (1) all groups you are a member of and (2) maybe a quick link to each service would be ideal, then we could tell users "you can get there a million ways, but here is a logical entry point for Groups as a destination"

      Bottom line, the Groups navigation should be the same across the board so the user can quickly move between workloads.  Our users are confused as hell

       

      I just created a User Guide for our users and had to include this slide:

      • Tejas Mehta's avatar
        Tejas Mehta
        Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
        Jan 30, 2017

        Thanks Brent!  You have called out an area where we clearly have room for improvement. :) 

         

        There is some work in-flight already, the first of which is introducing a common 'Group Card' that each workload will use and will surface intra-group navigation, among other things. 

         

        We also have an effort underway where we are actively looking at opportunities to drive better 'coherence' across Office 365 Groups and navigation is one of the core topics we are exploring currently.   We can share more details once we've landed on a model that works well across all group workloads.

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