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Ability to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups is coming later this year

Microsoft

Important sets of announcements today from the SharePoint team, including this specific one coming later this year:

  • The ability to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups, so you can augment existing sites with shared conversations, calendar and Planner.

https://blogs.office.com/2017/05/16/new-sharepoint-and-onedrive-capabilities-accelerate-your-digital...

74 Replies

So, here, as an example is what I see when I go and setup a SharePoint Site... if this is the classic experience what is the 'new' experience where a site is connected to an Office 365 group?

2018-01-04 16_25_53-New SharePoint Site.png

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! ...

sorry, just one other thing... I notice from this article is more like what I'm expecting (see section, 'Connect an existing SharePoint team site to a new Office 365 group'):
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Work-better-together-with-SharePoint-team-sit...

New OG groups are either created in the Office Admin Centre, or in the Outlook Groups part of Outlook's menus, or when you create a Team, or when you launch "SharePoint" from the Office 365 app launcher (waffle menu).

 

Old SP sites are created as you've described above.

 

The classic sites probably reside in a different corner of MS's Office 365 datacentre from the OG sites, both with respect to where the data is and the admin functionality that manages them.  Notice the OG sites don't appear in the list of SP sites in the Office 365 SharePoint Admin Centre.

 

This is another reason - over and above the differing SP site templates - why MS will have to work quite hard to produce an upgrade or "magic merge" solution:  The two systems and data areas are separate, and therefore data will have to be copied between the two.  The process will likely not be able to happen in place.

Hi all!  We are absolutely working on a feature that will connect an existing classic team site to a new Office 365 Group.  We had a session at Ignite that covers the mechanics in more detail - you can have a look at this session: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/Microsoft-Ignite-Orlando-2017/BRK2434 and the 'groupify' portion starts at around the 19:13 mark of the video.

An existing team site if it is a subsite of a site collection? @Tejas Mehta

No, ability to add a Group to classic SPO sites means to add it to site collections...there are not plans to add Groups to subsites
Great news.
When can we expect this feature to be rolled out.
I read "later this year" on https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/05/16/new-sharepoint-and-onedrive-capabilities-accelerate-your-d... but nothing yet as of today right?
I'm planning to write some internal policy and I need to know when this can be expected to be available.
Thanks

Hi, 

When exactly is this being rolled out? It was announced during Ignite in September. It's been 3.5 months with still no estimate date when to be rolled out?

I have been planning my rollouts based on this announcement to avoid migrating sites.

 

I'd really appreciate a more SMART goal, with specifics as to when we can expect this to be usable. 

Yesterday it was eight months since this was announced, how long do we need to wait @Tejas Mehta and @Christophe Fiessinger? We have hundreds of classic Team Sites which we would like to modernize to get them smoothly connected with Teams and Planner.

Hey Teemu, are they all separate site collections? Just wanted to make sure you know that the proposed solution is only for site collections and cannot be applied to subsites.

Not sure if it helps but it seems that the item is on the Office 365 roadmap under the name 'SharePoint: connect an existing site to a new Office 365 group' and currently under development. You can find the roadmap here: https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap?filters=%26freeformsearch=connect%20an...

 

Yes I know that. Most of the Team Sites we use are separate Site Collections with just few having subwebs (subsites).

Yes, it has been there some time (added in June last year) but apparently it has been updated yesterday and now the ETA is Q1 CY2018 so fingers crossed! :) It would be nice to hear some insights from the product group here in the tech community as this should be place where IT experts and customers could get closer to the product group and development, and not just follow general road map items.
I usually post here and on twitter to gather more attention and a faster response. But I agree, this was announced eons ago and still nothing, plus I've been planning my role out of Groups contingent on this functionality.

@Christophe Fiessinger will "Groupifying" a SharePoint site be a admin controlled feature? If not, this will completely change how we manage our SharePoint Online environment.

Hi - yes, this feature will be admin controlled.  There will be a setting that determines whether the feature is activated for a tenant, and then the feature itself will be available to site admins.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks,

Tejas


@Deleted wrote:

@Christophe Fiessinger will "Groupifying" a SharePoint site be a admin controlled feature? If not, this will completely change how we manage our SharePoint Online environment.