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
For converting old team sites to the new modern team site experience - that's already partly happening, with features like modern lists, libraries, pages, and site contents. We want to enable the ability to connect an Office365 group with existing sites, but we don't have a timeline to announce on that yet.

It's already possible to create subwebs in team sites associated with O365 groups! Give it a try!

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.

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!
At this stage, Office 365 Groups - the membership component that manages permissions - is deployed into Office 365. Following that, the underlying services, like the modern team site or shared calendar, is created in Office 365, thus requiring the end user to have access rights to Office 365. AKA, to use a modern team site connected to Office 365 groups, the user needs to be assigned an Office 365 license.

My assumption is that you are trying to do this from the modern team home site, by clicking the New drop-down menu to the right of the team site name (see attached file), and then selecting "Document library."

 

Is that how you are doing it? Once created, you can then choose to incorporate it within the left-hand navigation of the site; you'd see the name you gave the new library.

 

- Mark

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
No, I am doing this from the modern Outlook page and there is no navigation to secondary libraries. It also only shows files in a flat format without groups. The issue we face is that Outlook has a whole different experience than the Office 365 Groups "team" landing page. One of these needs to take precedence IMO

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:

2017-01-26 17_54_18-Office 365 Groups User Guide.pptx - PowerPoint.jpg

Great stuff Brent!!! It clearly shows what you describe in your post and the reality of this inconsistency in Groups navigation accross workloads

Agree 100% with this.  Our users are completely confused as well.  It feels like to me Microsoft is trying too hard to not make a SharePoint team site the primary go to spot for a user.  The perfect "portal" location is already there just make sure users can easily navigte to other components.  Maybe this is the point of teams, but at this point I'm getting collaboration fatigue and am not willing to introduce yet another tool into our environment.  It's much too difficult for users to select the appropriate tool.  They do not have the time or patience to run down a list of requirements everytime they need to share a file. 

Thank you Brent for the visual!  I just had this same conversation yesterday with our SharePoint team at my company.  We aren't really sure how to explain navigation to them.  One of the most disappointing parts for us is not having a single landing place where they can see all of their Groups, besides in Outlook.  They are used to being able to go to SharePoint to see their "Teams."  Everyone knows technology changes, and we have to learn new ways of doing things, but this scenario just makes it more difficult.  I agree that it is not intuitive, and will be hard to explain to the users how to navigate throughout their new sites.

We need to be able to customize the features of a group....too many things they might not use that I want to hide, and other things I want to add. The Navigation on the new Modern page sis really really really poor. Please fix this so we can actually use it.

I have also experienced this problem.  Please advise why contents of a private group are not being indexed in the Sharepoint Online search index.

Hi Brian - today you should be able to search for content in private groups from SharePoint Home and from within the private group itself.  There is work underway to enable private group results from Delve (and classic search) as well.  The timeframe on that front will align with 'search with personal relevance' which was announced at Ignite in this session. @Bernt Ivar Olsen might be able to share additional details here.

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.

A message sent to us on 9th January via the admin center mentioned that SharePoint Online team sites integration with Office 365 Groups was starting worldwide rollout and that it is expected to be completed by the end of the month. It is now February and the site option via a group is still not visible for our users, only a handful of us on First release can see this. Messages sent out and actual work taking place on tenants are not matching up, this is not the first time I have experienced this do we know when this worldwide rollout is meant to finish? 

Office365 Groups getting SharePoint Sites is fully rolled out to production at this point.  Do you have a "Site" link in the group navigation in Outlook?  Do you see a "Home" tab when you view group files in Outlook?

I am accessing groups via OWA (screenshot attached), when I click on the more tab I can only see "Planner" where I am expecting to see "Site" I can see this when logging in with an account which is in first release on the same tenant. 

Hi Shaun - you should see the "Site" tab appear within a couple of days.  The Exchange team needed to wait until the "Groups get sites" capability hit 100% of our production farms before enabling this link in the OWA header.  The temporary way to get to the group's team site from OWA is to:

1) Click on the 'Files' tab in OWA.  This takes you to the OWA group file view

2) Click on 'Browse library' in the top right of the page

3) You will now be in the group's SharePoint doclib

4) Click on 'Home' in the left nav

 

 

Thanks Tejas, I have checked today and the "Site" tab now appears. Understand we could have reach the sites via a different route but it was more that we were looking to send out comms to our users about this feature and wanted to direct users to using this "Site" tab to keep it simple. My issue was more around the messaging saying it was expected to be rolled out by end of January meaning if it wasn't which there was a chance I feel another message should have been sent out to advise this. 

All is good now in my tenant.

Thanks again.