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

[Mark Kashman]

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 rollout. This next phase of the rollout will start Thursday, January 12, 2017, and is expected to complete to customers worldwide in 100% of production by the end of the month.

 

The new SharePoint Online team site home page for an Office 365 group showcases important news, content and site activity.

When you create a group, Office 365 gives the group a shared inbox, calendar, OneNote notebook, a Planner for task management—and now, a full-powered SharePoint team site. Each group gets a modern home page—with the ability to create additional pages—document libraries, lists and business apps.

The integration of groups and SharePoint team sites means that any time a new team site is created, a new group membership will be created as well. You can easily see the members of the site, if the site is listed as public or private within your organization and how it has been classified. In addition, all existing Office 365 groups will be updated with their own team site. And once the rollout is complete for your tenant, all existing and newly created groups will get a team site by default.

Within a group’s team site, this roll out brings a new home page, features News for highlighting important content in the team, and the Activity web part for showing recently active content. These team sites also include our new responsive and powerful page authoring and consumption experience – all connected to the overall Office 365 group experience.

There is nothing you need to do but collaborate with your team in a more modern, connected way.

Please ask in a reply to this thread if you have any questions. We are pleased to reach this milestone, and here with you along the way.

Thanks,

Mark

[#2]

Great work Team!

[#3]

Gratz on reaching that milestone :)

[#4]

Any idea about Yammer interation for Team site groups?

[#5]

Hi Ben Follow this blog: http://thecloudmouth.com/2017/01/09/integrating-yammer-into-microsoft-teams/

it explains how to add Yammer in teams :)

[#6]

Thank you, I was talking about the integration betwen groups and Yammer.

We are supposed to have a team site and a convesation listing and depending on where it is created your conversations are happening in yammer or Outlook

Thanks for the post about Teams and Yammer

[#7]

Lovely! Things are moving on the right way.

[#8]

Does this mean that the new client side webparts can be used in production environments?

[#9]

Soon, but not quite, for 3rd party custom web parts built using the new SharePoint Framework - it is still in preview stage. That said, the 1st party components in the service today when you create a new News article or modern page are fully supported by Microsoft.

[#10]

Integration between Yammer and Groups is coming...

[#11]

You might use SPFx WebParts when SPFx leaves preview status and is generally available...something that's not happening Today, so If I were you, I would not use third party SPFx WebParts in production...I guess you can use Microsoft's SPFx WebParts with no problems :)

[#12]

Congrats on the release! :)

[#13]

Good work team!

Just curious, is there a common navigation framework available for cross site navigation? Something like managed metadata navigation? It would be great to be able to easily navigate between different group sites without having to manually re-create the navigation on each site. Anything planned?

[#14]

Any way to connect my current IT SharePoint teamsite to my Office 365 IT group?

[#15]

This is a question for our start up, too! How to get a SharePoint sites with mailboxes (and all those functions - e.g. mailing/discussion, calendar, planner, etc. - which would fit to MS Teams quite well) entirely connected to Office 365 groups to get best experience with MS Teams? Thanks!

[#16]

At this moment there is no way to connect an existing SPO Site with an existing Group

[#17]

If I create a new teamsite i can't see an associated Office Group in my first release tenant. Is that  feature already released?

the other way works if I create a Group a teamsite is also created

[#18]

You have to create the modern team site from the SharePoint Landing page

[#19]

Benjamin,

That is the way it works. Groups are connected to new team sites. Old team sites are not related to groups.

[#20]

Ok great thanks for help

[#21]

I'm concerned that the sharepoint online team sites in office 365 groups are not fully featured compared with "classic sharepoint online".  

Can we have clarity about permissions that apply to sharepoint teamsites within groups?  Is it possible to apply different permissions to folders within an Office 365 group?

[#22]

how can we set it up so end users can't create groups.  I don't want a bunch of team sites around just because someone decided to create a group.

[#23]

Is there a way to turn off this functionality for a tenant?  As an education client, I do not want all my student created groups to have sharepoint team sites.  We use other services for this purpose.

[#24]

Carolynn, this has been my biggest negative with Groups since the SharePoint integration was announced.  Not every group needs every service, and often too much is provisioned IMO.  Need to beef up grass roots efforts (user voice and forums) to get this kind of feature build in:

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/16619995-ability-to-cont...

[#25]

@Carolynn Parisi You can always prevent certain people to create groups. Take a look at the following link: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-Office-365-Group-Creation-4c46c8cb-17d0-44b5-9776-00...

I don't know if this also works with site creation...

[#26]

Would be very helpful to have some sort of configurable provisioning steps for Office Groups. :)

[#27]

Hi Daniel,

There is:
https://veenstra.me.uk/2016/11/24/creating-office-365-groups-using-pnp-powershell/

[#28]

That one I know. I was more thinking of configurable like with / without files, planner etc.

[#29]

Small #SPFx update - it's hit FC0: https://twitter.com/OfficeDev/status/818574028826767360 #progresstoGA.

[#30]

There is not today. The team is reviewing how we enable classic SharePoint Online team sites to be groups aware. Nothing more to share, other than to assert it's an area under review. And know that classic team site in SharePoint Online already have many of the modern SharePoint components: modern lists and libraries, ability to create modern pages, ability to create a modern page and make it the default home page, modern site contents page, and News is also coming to classic team sites.

Hope that helps,

Mark

[#31]

Thanks for the update Mark. I have added our Classic SharePoint Site as a tab in our Teams Interface so users can easily get to the documents, but people are confused now as to why there are 2 places to save docs to in teams. I guess I should just take the plunge and migrate everything over to the new site that was created when I spun up the Team/Group for us in teams. 

[#32]

As Juan mentioned, you can create a new modern team site connected to Office 365 groups when you click "Create site" from the SharePoint home in Office 365. This, too, is true if you create a group from Outlook, a modern team site will also get create as a part of the apps available to the group. However, if you create a new site collection from the SharePoint Online admin center (with the intent to provide a new team site), this will not create a modern team site conected to an Office 365 group, rather it creates a classic SharePoint Online team site.

Hope that helps,

Mark

[#33]

By default, the membership of the group is managed by the group membership capabilities (owners and members). And that suffices for most. But as it is a SharePoint team site, you can certainly adjust the people & poermissions as you had in the past. We promote the top level membeship as where most go to manage the group's team site. And if you need more, and approach it thoguhtfully with good infomration architecture in mind, then you can achieve that as well.

Hope that helps,

Mark

[#34]

You manage this at the Office 365 groups level, where you determine who you wish to be able to create groups, and who cannot. The "create site" button on the SharePoint home will comply with this admin control.

Hope that helps,

Mark

[#35]

I know they hear this feedback, and for now, it's tightly bound within the provisioning pipeline from the variety of entry points for groups creation.

[#36]

I don't see it as a big problem, but it would be nice in the future to create different kind of Groups, GroupSites or how we will call them now for different scenarios ;)

[#37]

Just to be sure: so, if you have set the admin control to not creating groups for some people, will they still be able to create a modern SP site? Or will they not be able to create a site or a group?

[#38]

Currently, teamsite that created by group is not supporting external sharing option. Is it "full powered"?

I do not think so..

[#39]

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-Office-365-Group-Creation-4c46c8cb-17d0-44b5-9776-00...

[#40]

How do we go about editing SharePoint sites created as part of a group?  I can't see them in SharePoint admin and trying to access the site settings for one such site fails.  Where are we supposed to configure any SPOSite created in such a way and what are the limitations when we compare these to site created in the SharePoint Admin center?

[#41]

have a look here:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_sharepoint-mso_win10/external-sharing-fr...

[#42]

Our SharePoint governance is all based around site collections.  Where do these new team sites go?  Tenant level?  Each of our regional offices has it's own site collection with sites being added for 0365 groups how do you suggest we govern?

[#43]

Each new modern team site connected to Office 365 groups is it's own site collection. They are created alongside all site collections, though do not yet appear in the site collection list of the SPO admin center; we are addressing this in a coming future update to the SPO admin center UI. And today, you can review and report on all via the SharePoint Online Management Shell; results returned do include ALL sister collections - classic and modern.

[#44]

Is this the reason why site creation is currently not working?

[#45]

My problem is, I still cannot edit the header if I add a page to the site. Why is that? And by the end of the month is it going to be editable? The issue is it tells me to give a title to the page but there's no way to change the background from that grey default one. Or is there?

[#46]

Our organisation wants documents to be open as much as possible, unless there are circumstances not to do so. When adding a sharepoint teamsite to a Office365 group, does the acess of documents in this particular Sharepoint teamsite be restricted to the members of the Office365 group, or can the documents be accessed (READ) by the entire organisation. Are there any guidelines on this? 

Regards, Jaap

[#47]

We want students to be able to create groups.  But we dont want them to have all of the components that are being added to groups.  So we need the ability to turn parts on or off for groups.  Or to create a default configuration of items that get provisioned automatically for groups and then the ability to add or subtract items by group.  So lets say i want the default for my tenant to be that groups do NOT get a team site or a shared notebook automatically.  Then if I have a particular group that does need one or both of these things, i can provision the items just to that group.

[#48]

We want students to be able to create groups.  But we dont want them to have all of the components that are being added to groups.  So we need the ability to turn parts on or off for groups.  Or to create a default configuration of items that get provisioned automatically for groups and then the ability to add or subtract items by group.  So lets say i want the default for my tenant to be that groups do NOT get a team site or a shared notebook automatically.  Then if I have a particular group that does need one or both of these things, i can provision the items just to that group

[#49]

When will this be available to Government and Education tenants?

[#50]

is there a way to not have sharepoint integrate old groups and is it office 365 groups or dist and security groups too?