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

Microsoft

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.

 

 Team-News_001.png

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

111 Replies

It does indeed! 

 

Recovering a group deleted last week that wasnt avialable in Get-SPODeletedSitethat is now.

 

Waiting to see what happens...

How will we know when the change has happened?  I keep checking every day to see if the "Create site" link opens to create a group, or checking my Office 365 Groups to see if they have a team site yet.  But I'm wondering if there's a better way to know/check?

No better way to know/check...by the way, you can directly try modern site creation by typing the following Url in your browser: https://<YourTenant>.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/creategroup.aspx

How come there is no centralized way to block groups from being created?  I thought we had lcked things down and then tried the link provided _layouts/15/creategroup.aspx and a group was created.  We want to control this administratively but there seem to be all sorts of backdoors to create a group, Planner, the new Time tracking app, PowerBI, etc.  

Thanks Juan Carlos.  Unfortunately, that url didn't work for me.  Just took me to a blank page.  Hopefully I get the updates soon!  They said it'll be rolled out by the end of the month... But we shall see. 

Update: Never mind, the group was not created HOWEVER, I was able to step through the group creation menus and was lead to believe that I successfully created a group.  Again, groups are proving to be more challenging in terms of Governance and control. They fill a need but at this point I cannot advocate them for the everyday user as their are too many options and confusing interface issues. For instance the files view doe not have folders. How is that possible?

 

Actually the group was created, it jsut took time...

Yeap...what I have seen when you create a modern team site is that the site is provisioned super fast, but the Group creation needs more time

Thanks but the general issue is that I need a way to granularly disable group creation from the GUI.  Powershell is too cumbersome for things that should be easier.

Have a look at this article.  Still may require PowerShell, but might close to what you're looking for.

 

https://whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2017/01/disable-office-365-groups-2/

I actually just noticed in our admin settings that the section for "Site Creation" has changed.  It now shows the option to create "A site with an Office 365 group or classic site", "A site with an Office 365 group", or "A classic site."  So it seems like our environment has been updated.

 

However, I created a site from the homepage, and it did not create a group.  We have the create "A site with an Office 365 group or classic site" option chosen, but I was not prompted with anything when I created the site. 

 

Does this mean that it's not completely rolled out to us yet?

Just to confirm, if you create a modern team site from the SharePoint landing page it results in the same thing as creating a Group from Outlook? If not, then what is the difference?

FYI from what I found, even the admin pages have First Release features so make sure your administraion account (if you use a secondary account like my company)  is part of the First Feature group or you will not see all the newest settings.  Found out the hard way.

Bruce,

Honestly, I am not postive about the difference of creating a modern team site from the SharePoint landing page or creating a 0365 group from Outlook.  What I do remember from the Chicago 2017 Microsoft Tech Summit last week is that it is very important where you create the group in terms of chat/conversations.  MS Teams means your group chat will be within Teams (not Yammer or Email) but you get the other 0365 group features, Yammer will give you the SharePoint site and 0365 group features (once this new integration deploys) but your chat/conversations will be in your Yammer group and if you start a 0365 group in Outlook your group conversation will be in the email group conversations.

 

Someone please clarify if I got this wrong and answer Bruce's question.

Please can someone help detail the search story for Office 365 Group Team Sites.

 

Currently, it appears that only 'Public' O365 Group Team Sites have contents indexed by the SharePoint search index.

'Private' groups do not.

 

You can test this by going to a 'Private' O365GTS document library and search for a document using the search box on the top right.  I get no results.

Searching using the search box on the top left of the 'Home' page gives results (Office Graph Search?)

 

Is there is a way to have 'Private' O365GTS contents indexed by SharePoint Search? Please can someone point me in the right direction...  It is not a good story for users to not have documents show up in the SharePoint search center...

Bruce, there's two release trains here that are in progress:

 

1. Groups created in Outlook get SharePoint sites.  This track is rolling out to production currently, and will be 100% everywhere by early next week.

2. Sites created from SharePoint Home get an Office365 group.  This track is in first release currently, and will roll out to the rest of production this quarter.

 

 

Is there any technical difference between both approaches...I have seen that if you create a Group from Outlook, the EXO inbox is created much faster than when you create a modern team site from the landing page...any other differences?
Hi, we have a hybrid exchange with onprem/ Office 365 and most users do not have mailboxes in Office 365 but they have E1 with Exchange Online turned off. This seems to cause issues when they try to add new members. What is the solution for this?

Both approaches end up with the same result - an Office365 group that includes a SharePoint site.

I see we have 2 distinct sets of SharePoint sites...

 

1) The tranditional SharePoint sites are found under https://<companyname>.sharepoint.com/  with subsites at https://<companyname>.sharepoint.com/<sitename>

 

2) The new group Sharepoint Team Sites are found under https://<companyname>.sharepoint.com/Sites/<sitename>

 

For the first set of sites, about 80% of our sites have been updated so that we can create the new Modern Team Sites.  None of these have been Groupified.

 

Anyone know the ETA for converting the old team sites to the new Modern Team Site experience?

 

Anyne know if Microsoft plans to allow the new Group + Team Site experience to have nested subsites?