Forum Discussion
MicrosoftAbility to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups is coming later this year
Hi all - yes our plan is to provide the ability to connect only root site collections to new Office 365 Groups. We've considered enabling subsite-to-group connections, but there are enough gotchas both architecturally as well as from a design standpoint in delivering an experience that is comprehensible to most humans. One example is that when we start rolling out classification-based policy (e.g. Confidential classification equates to group guests being disabled, SharePoint external sharing turned off, etc. - this is just an example for discussion), those policies apply at the site collection container level. If we enabled subsite connection to groups, we would have to deal with site parent-child policy conflicts, inheritance-based permissions, etc. Not saying it's impossible but cleary stands in the way of shipping an experience sooner.
Having looked at all site collections in the service, the vast majority are flat (i.e. no subwebs), for which this experience should work seamlessly. That said, we acknowledge that there are some very active site collections with subsite hierarchies. For these subwebs, there are a couple of paths to get to 'modern'. One is a migration effort from subsite to root site collection, and then connecting the collection to a new group with the feature described in this thread. The other, is a 'modernize this site' type of experience that brings the classic subsite to the modern experiences without a group connection. This is also a body of work we are investing in and will share additional details in the future.
Hope this helps to clarify. We'll definitely be talking more about this in the coming months as we make progress on the feature.
Thanks
Hi Baronne,
Let's say your old "classic" site is called Old-Contoso, and it has the usual 3x SP Groups: Old-Contoso Owners, Old-Contoso Members, Old-Contoso Visitors. You manage members of the SPG's in the usual manner, by selecting security principals from the people picker.
And you've got a new Office Group called New-Contoso. So this comes with its own membership management, surfaced in the Office 365 Admin Centre -> Groups, and also in the Outlook Groups presentation of the OG functionality.
If you go to the Old-Contoso SP site -> Site Settings -> People and Groups, and select one of the SPG's, say Old-Contoso Members, then add a new user, the people picker will let you select the OG's like they were users. If you add an OG to an SPG, the members of the OG membership gets the access that the SPG has to sites, libraries, folders, and docs in the Old-Contoso site.
Likewise, if you go to a site, library, folder, or document in the Old-Contoso site, and disinherit its permissions from its parent, and add permissions, the people picker will allow you to add an OG and grant it permissions.
So you can use OG's, for example the New-Contoso OG, to puppet master the permission across your old "classic" SP sites, for example Old-Contoso, by adding the OG's as members of the old "classic" SP sites' SPG's, or by directly granting the OG's access permissions on the old "classic" SP sites' containers (sites, libraries, folders) and documents.
So in a migration or hybrid you can manually configure the OG's to duplicate the old permissions by creating OG's with memberships, adding them to the old sites SPG's, containers, and documents permissions. Then delete the old memberships of old SPG's.
The old sites and SPG's are then security "zombies" from a group membership point of view. All granting of collective permissions is made by member management of the new OG's, and by granting permissions of those OG's onto the resources of the old sites.
OG group : TEAMA (https://ourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/TEAMA)
SP Site : TEAMA (https://ourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/BU/TEAMA)
...somehow the two could link so they didn't have "separate" SharePoint sites...
So from what you're saying the connecting of these is en essence to do with assoication by security group permissions rather than some fancy magical merge...
The "connecting" piece, i.e. in addition to permissions, can only be achieved thus far by some form of linky type navigation integration. Intertwining the menus on one site and the other, giving the appearance of merging the two, sort of thing.
The one suggested above was to use Teams. A Team has its intrinsic new OG site. And this is the site that the link on the Team tab called "Files" goes to. But you can add another tab to the Team called Old Files and link that to the old classic SP site.
Then on the left nav / quick launch of both old and new sites put all the same menu items / links on both old and new sites. You could indent the old and new libraries on the menu one above the other. So the Contoso scenario might look like this: -
V Documents
Old Documents
V Finance Docs Library
Old Finance Docs Library
If the user clicks on "Old Documents" they're taken to the "Old Documents" library on the old site. But because the left nav / quick launch menu looks identical on both old and new sites, they don't perceive the click through as a site-to-site navigation. Rather the old library looks like a sub-folder of the new library, and the click through appears as merely navigating to the sub-folder in the same site. (That visual trick / technique is quite useful for when you hit the 5000 limit on libraries too, splitting out the biggest root level folders into their own libraries and indenting them below the original library on the left nav / quick launch from whence they came).
And if the permissions setup is done as above and doesn't hinder them, they might, as one user said to me, wonder if the migration has already been done: "Why did you bring the old folders over into a sub-folder of the new library? Couldn't you have copied them to the root?"
No, of course, the users, or me, or someone has still got to lift those folders across. This is not a "magic merge" or groupification / teamification upgrade of an old "classic" SP site. That's what we're waiting for from Redmond. But at least Teams, the menu interleaving, and permissions tricks gives the perception of progress, integration, and old-new hybrid-ity quite early on in the project.
On the subject of the so-and-so's getting the actual job done, looks like they've missed the "this year" deadline. I suspect it might be quite a bit trickier than they thought. The new OG site and old "classic" site are two totally different SP site templates. The project to deliver the new OG sites was probably all done in an Agile/ Scrum-ish sort of way, with no-one lifting their head above the tactical parapet of the new OG world user story backlog to ascertain what strategic chaos it might cause for migrating / upgrading from the old world.
Go on Redmond, prove me wrong. Tell me you can "magic merge" or groupify / teamify / upgrade an old "classic" SP site on patch Tuesday next week! ...