ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages

[#1]

Good question! @Robert Woods 

Not everything is created from SharePoint and more often OneDrive tends to be a starting point for a document lifecycle and eventually will end up in a SharePoint team site or even in Groups! Overall for me they are the endpoints to get to the information relevant to me.

I've highlighted the key differentiators between each of the apps.

OneDrive app
- lets you work with your personal (OneDrive) and work files (OneDrive For Business)
- access all your OneDrive files and files shared with you

SharePoint App
- access to intranet
- quick access to your team sites and the people you work with
- to see the site activity, sites you frequently visit and the sites you follow
- share a site (subject to permissions)
- access to recent and popular files spreasd across multiple document libraries

Outlook Groups (Office 365 Groups) App:
- Easily participate in group email conversations
- Work together using the shared team OneNote's notebook
- Discover and join Office 365 Groups relevant to you

Hope this helps.

[#2]

The purpose of groups is for getting work done together.  SharePoint is one of the tools the group has.  Outlook for mails, calendar for calendar, planner for tasks, SharePoint for files, pages, lists, apps, Flows, PowerApps, etc.

[#3]

We are working on publishing and managed navigation support on modern pages. Very sorry, but no ETA yet.

[#4]

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.

[#5]

We are working on updating the "+ Create" button in SharePoint Home to create team sites + groups. By default, New Groups you create through Outlook, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint home will all be the same thing - a group, which includes a team site as one of its workloads.  This will be released before the end of the year. Stay tuned for more details.

In time, this experience will be fully customizable, so you can tune what gets provisioned, and who gets to do the provisioning.

[#6]

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@Lincoln DeMaris 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.

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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.

[#7]

Any chance view / read-only rights will be supported?

[#8]

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?

[#9]

Yes - the limitations of the new homepage and new publishing pages are the same as the limitations in modern lists and libraries, at least as far as branding is concerned.

[#10]

Thanks for the answer! If that is the case, will we then also be able to disable the new home page and the new publishing pages until we are given the relevant branding / custom tools?

[#11]

What about Yammer, which we have embedded in our team sites. I outline some alternatives: 1) Will Yammer replace the newsfeed as the out-of-the-box social feed in sites 2) Will a Yammer feed still be embeddable as today. 3) Will Yammer be a web part that we will have access to via the new publishing pages, or 4) Do you have any other kind of integration between sites and Yammer in mind?

[#12]

@Allan With Sørensen 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.

[#13]

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?

[#14]

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.

[#15]

This is great, but will you have videos of the samples you show in your blog so we can actually pause and look at it. I was trying to show it to some users and we had to watch it cycle through 3 or 4 times to catch what was going on.

Looking forward to this feature. It really helps get rid of the confusion of Groups vs. SharePoint. I look at it as a way to integrate a lot of functionality together.

[#16]

@Mark Kashman with respect to customizing the site URL mentioned in the comments of the blog post, this is not quite "vanity" per se, but a desire to keep the URLs tidy. Even when the sites are standalone and not in a site structure (where 256 path names make short URLs very important).

e.g. Team Name is Emerging Technologies and Social Collaboration

They may want the URL to be "emsc" 

At least group URLs don't include @%20 in the URLs. That's a super (long-overdue) positive step for sure. 

[#17]

Great news. Could someone please clarify if and how the root SharePoint Site Collection (domain.sharepoint.com) will be affected by this, for example if its still untouched?

Will this also get group features?

[#18]

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?

[#19]

A question for the people in the know. How will the new Group Sites handle permissions. Will we be able to set different permission levels on a library basis, like on a SharePoint site? Will we be able to use the Group Admin level in our permissions, sort of like Site Owners - Site Members - Site Visitors? Thanks!

[#20]

@Joe Fedorowicz Office 365 Groups was always based on SharePoint Site Collection (i.e. top level site with one library).

The integration now expands this site into a full-blown SharePoint site as we know it. Therefore, more site ownership controls such as permissions and create other business apps, etc. 

[#21]

Can an O365 group be deleted and leave the SharePoint site intact?

And vice versa, can the SharePoint site be deleted and leave the O365 Group intact?

I'd really like to see something where you can enable/disable features in an Group/SharePoint site

e.g.
- I want JUST a sharepoint site with no group
- I want a group with no sharepoint site, and planner, and discussion turned on
- I want a group with a sharepoint site
- I want a group with planner turned off, and everything else turned off, just the discussion and document library
etc

[#22]

Yep, but we are now adding "Group Managers" into the mix. Are they going to live in the "Site Owners" by default? or will they just be members with permissions on the "Group" level?

[#23]

Will changes be coming to the SharePoint Homepage so users can organize the tiles? Or at least can you have the See All View alpha sort? It's extremely challenging to locate the desired site when you're following a lot. Also, we're still looking for the ability to control the colors.

[#24]

The implementation of permissions in SharePoint is a nightmare of your own creation. Good luck.

[#25]

I'd have previously described Team Sites as a 'container', designed to bring everything your team needs together in one place. This used to be a collection of standard apps or experiences built within SharePoint. I think Groups are assuming this role, but are instead acting as a container for Microsoft products built outside of SharePoint. In the process of this happening, Team Sites have effectively been demoted from a container to one of several products that sit within the new container, Groups.

[#26]

@Joe Fedorowicz currently the permission groups consist of owners, members and visitors. For each of the group, the group name permission object (i.e. test 3) resides in all of the above permission groups - screenshot below.

Makes perfect sense to use at least the owners and members group. We'll have await further information as how this will pan out.

[#27]

The correct solution is to turn on metadata based navigation, and configure the most important columns as either key filters or hierarchies. That has the effect of making it really easy to create selective queries over large lists, and has built in fallback behavior for times when the user accidently selects too large a data set. The basics for setting that up can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/configure-metadata-navigation-for-a-list-or...

We have extensive documentation on designing large lists here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262813.aspx.

And finally, it's a known, common concern and the team is rationlizing how we can tackle this in the future.

[#28]

They will continue to work, and you can switch to our default provisioning if you choose. For now, we won't enable the default team sites + groups provisioning to be extended. Today, you can build your own or use the out-of-box.

[#29]

They will work, but they won't come from the Graph so it's a bit lesser of an offering. We default to another method to showcase site activity when the Graph is turned off. But my two cents, don't turn it off - you lose a lot of richness and intelligence across Office 365. :)

[#30]

Each app has a main use case, and certainly some overlap in cases - or hand off from app-to-app when appropriate. SharePoint app = sites & portals access. OneDrive = files management. Groups app = interact with group conversations. The portfolio of apps is always being evaluated and adjustments of how they interact and overlap are expected. Hope that helps, Mark.

[#31]

First main diff to consider is that Office 365 Groups creates an object in Azure Active Directory (AAD), where it can then support auth across apps more easily. Next I'd say we are using the best of all apps. For example: Calendaring and mail are best offered via Exchange Online - and Office 365 Groups uses EXO to provide the group with a shared cal and inbox; and improvement over SharePoint calendars and site mailboxes. We do use SharePoint Online for the Group's notebook, document library (Files) and now the site itself for pages, lists, subsites and biz apps. And beyond these examples, Groups brings access to Planner, Power BI, Skype for Business, etc.. with much easier integration and permisisons management. Initial thoughts. Hope it helps. - Mark.

[#32]

This is not a part of the plan.

[#33]

First, I'd say the main differrence in how to think about it is that it is not Groups vs Team, it's Office 365 + the full power of a SharePoint Online team site. Groups is the list of members, and SharePoint is where they get work done - right alongside the ability for the group to have a shared inbox and calendar, a team notebook, group Skype ("Meet now"), etc. SharePoint Online team sites have always contributed the default document library for the group, "Files." And with this update, we more fully expose all SharePoint capabilities within the same site collection.

[#34]

When you first create your tenant, you get default pooled storage for SharePoint Online, calculated at 1TB + (0.5GB * E users); so for 5,000 seats, the company would have 3.5 TB of pooled SPO storage on day one. And then you can purchase additional storage for $0.20USD/GB/month as needed.

[#35]

No. It only removes the entry point from SharePoint home. Users, in this scenario, would still be able to create a Group from Outlook, and the end result (starting soon) means that they group gets a team site, too, alongside the shared calendar, inbox, notebook, etc...

[#36]

Untouched, and we are working on a plan for bringing groups to existing team sites, and this would be optional.

[#37]

It follows the membership management Office 365 Groups offers. AKA, Office 365 Groups, the list of members, provides the authentication mechanism for these team sites; not the site settings > people and groups of SharePoint.

[#38]

Yes. We will first tackle configuration of the home page, and then move to enabling extensibility.

[#39]

Hi Brent,

Office 365 Groups weren't designed to have workload components removed, and as such you cannot keep the an orphaned SharePoint site after removing its parent Group (or vice versa).  There will still be ways to provision traditional SharePoint sites that are not connected to groups though.

Can you comment further on the scenarios where you would want to have stripped down functionality (e.g. just conversations and files)?

[#40]

SharePoint does provide the ability for Site Owners to specify different permissions on resources. Office 365 Groups promises a permission model whereby all group members have access to the group’s resources across workloads (e.g. conversations, files, notebook, etc.). To deliver consistency, SharePoint site collections associated with a Group will also follow this model. So, a group (site) owner can add new permission levels and assign to new users or groups on a resource, but would not be able to remove the permission levels assigned to the group’s owners or members. We are working on delivering a new permissions management UX that will allow for group (site) owners to change the group members’ permission level from Edit to Read-only (and vice versa) but you would not be able to remove the members from resources in the SharePoint site collection.

[#41]

@Chirag Patel These apps should all be combined into one. There is no way my end users can manage having 3 different apps for basically the same functionality. 

[#42]

I'm also interested in understanding how Yammer will be positioned and impact to embed and feed.

[#43]

I'm also interested in understanding how Yammer will be positioned and impact to embed and feed.

[#44]

Having the ability to assign read-only access is a big deal in our case and I believe many others.  As much we try to be more inclusive instead of exclusive, everyone having the same access doesn't always sit right.  Often we say "teams" but within those teams are different roles, responsiblities and tasks.  Sometimes that team isn't always about working together on every part but more about presenting final data/assets/reports/documents/etc to others.  That collateral ultimately we want to surface through the teamsite/page itself.

I really think one of the biggest issues some of us struggle with is that Groups give us great tools for the "doing" and "working on it" modes and then teamsites let us finish everything off with the "presentation" piece.  The issue is that we don't always want to expose the "working" pieces to everyone.  Not everyone needs to see the cake being made in the bakery, or the discussions/disagreements/chaos in the background.  Teamsites are like that glass window where the cake is shown.  That's the struggle most of us have is that with Groups + Teamsites, now everyone can go into the back room.

[#45]

Thank you so much @MarkKashan for the clarification. You've explained it so better, that I see that this is a much improved way of connecting the components together as compared to the earlier team-sites with site-mailbox and cal etc.

That reminds me of asking another question - Am I correct in my understanding that when a group is created, the default documents library is located in a separate site-collection (and that host web will contain only this document library) and the new team-site will be provisioned as a separate sub-site inside a pre-designated but different site-collection? So, in effect there will be two SharePoint sites involved with one group? Or am I completely wrong and that there is only one site-collection which holds all the SharePoint components together for a group?

[#46]

@Lillian and @Morten, it seems there is a web part for Yammer to make it easy to embed it on a modern page.

[#47]

Thats great, but the storage upgrade to 25TB is applicable to all tenant existing? or only for new plans of O365 that i acquire?

[#48]

We would like to know about " Upgrade Project Online and SharePoint Online". Below are the Some question regarding this: We want to Upgrade our Subscription and need response for the following queries. 1. what is the Cost of incremental SP Storage 2. what is the Capacity a 250 user SP/PS system has compared to 100 user 3. Is there a way to extend PS CPU capacity (beyond storage) if found slow? 4. what is the Plan for Backup & Disaster Recovery for Project online. Kindly do suggest for above. Thanks & Regards, Prashant

[#49]

1. 0.20 $/GB/ month
2. I don't understand what you mean...if you are talking about storage, simply apply the following formula: 1 TB + 500 MB x # Users in your tenant
3. I don't understad what you mean.
4. Microsoft makes a daily backup of your data each day...each backup is retained by Microsoft 14 days...just check SPO service description

[#50]

How about "the other way around"? Are we going to have the opportunity to connect existing Team Sites to an existing/new Office 365 group=