- The ability to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups, so you can augment existing sites with shared conversations, calendar and Planner.
Forum Discussion
cfiessinger
Microsoft
MicrosoftAbility to connect existing SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups is coming later this year
Important sets of announcements today from the SharePoint team, including this specific one coming later this year:
Hi all - yes our plan is to provide the ability to connect only root site collections to new Office 365 Groups. We've considered enabling subsite-to-group connections, but there are enough gotchas both architecturally as well as from a design standpoint in delivering an experience that is comprehensible to most humans. One example is that when we start rolling out classification-based policy (e.g. Confidential classification equates to group guests being disabled, SharePoint external sharing turned off, etc. - this is just an example for discussion), those policies apply at the site collection container level. If we enabled subsite connection to groups, we would have to deal with site parent-child policy conflicts, inheritance-based permissions, etc. Not saying it's impossible but cleary stands in the way of shipping an experience sooner.
Having looked at all site collections in the service, the vast majority are flat (i.e. no subwebs), for which this experience should work seamlessly. That said, we acknowledge that there are some very active site collections with subsite hierarchies. For these subwebs, there are a couple of paths to get to 'modern'. One is a migration effort from subsite to root site collection, and then connecting the collection to a new group with the feature described in this thread. The other, is a 'modernize this site' type of experience that brings the classic subsite to the modern experiences without a group connection. This is also a body of work we are investing in and will share additional details in the future.
Hope this helps to clarify. We'll definitely be talking more about this in the coming months as we make progress on the feature.
Thanks
We create site collections per customers and sub sites per projects. Real collaboration occurs on project so I was expecting a Group at the project level.
As we have a lot of sites (150k customers / 180k projects) we didn't want to create all the sites as site collection.
I was really hoping for sub sites Groups.
- I assume this is really connecting existing "SITE COLLECTIONS" to groups, and not sub-sites?
Wait...site collections. That would be no good. Our site collections are per regional office and our subsites are departments. We NEED to be able to connect an 0365 group to a sub-site. Please clarify Microsoft.
Tejas MehtaHi all - yes our plan is to provide the ability to connect only root site collections to new Office 365 Groups. We've considered enabling subsite-to-group connections, but there are enough gotchas both architecturally as well as from a design standpoint in delivering an experience that is comprehensible to most humans. One example is that when we start rolling out classification-based policy (e.g. Confidential classification equates to group guests being disabled, SharePoint external sharing turned off, etc. - this is just an example for discussion), those policies apply at the site collection container level. If we enabled subsite connection to groups, we would have to deal with site parent-child policy conflicts, inheritance-based permissions, etc. Not saying it's impossible but cleary stands in the way of shipping an experience sooner.
Having looked at all site collections in the service, the vast majority are flat (i.e. no subwebs), for which this experience should work seamlessly. That said, we acknowledge that there are some very active site collections with subsite hierarchies. For these subwebs, there are a couple of paths to get to 'modern'. One is a migration effort from subsite to root site collection, and then connecting the collection to a new group with the feature described in this thread. The other, is a 'modernize this site' type of experience that brings the classic subsite to the modern experiences without a group connection. This is also a body of work we are investing in and will share additional details in the future.
Hope this helps to clarify. We'll definitely be talking more about this in the coming months as we make progress on the feature.
Thanks
- I guess so!
cfiessinger - I'm surprised more tenancies aren't making use of sub-sites. We followed our same onPrem architecture of creating a few top level site collections and then creating multiple site collections under them. The ability to connect a Group to a Sub-Site is going to be critical to our business given the subsites in the structure of PPPM ( Portfolio, Programme, Project management) processes we follow.
Is this something Microsoft are considering, on their roadmap?We also did it this way to work within the 2,000 subsite per site collection limit, while also maximising our protection from the 500,000 limit of site collections per tenancy.
Any advice / guidance - greatly appreciated
- Tejas Mehta
Hi Graham, thanks for your feedback. At present we don't have plans to enable connection of subsites to Office 365 Groups. There are numerous hurdles and technical complexities we'd need to overcome, e.g. how do you treat group privacy or external guest access to parent (or child) sites that have been connected to groups themselves or how would users of other group workloads (e.g. mailbox) expect to interact with parent/child resources outside of SharePoint? Implementing the corresponding constraints and representing them in a way that site owners can interpret meaningfully in our interface is a challenging task.
Out of curiosity - are you anywhere near 500k site collections in your tenant, or foresee breaking through that number?
Thanks,
Tejas
Thank you for such a quick response.
That is a real problem for us. I appreciate some of the challenges that you have flagged.
In our specific case, the permission inheritance aspects are not such a big deal. We've architected our sites and sub-sites this way more so for the IA aspects rather than the permission inheritance, i.e. we make more use of Site Collection Content Types, Site Columns etc, so that each set of sub-sites pull from their specific set of common js and css etc.
I guess, what we want to know is that. In the Groups interface can change the link behind the Files and Notebook links?
and future in Teams - change the Files link or remove it so we can add our own Files link.
To answer your question. Right now, do to Self-Services site creation process we have over 2,000 sites collection. However, we are planning to link our solution to automate the creation of these sub-sites based on business rules in our Enterprise Data Warehouse, so when a Job or Lead reaches a particular business state the tools like, the SharePoint site, Group calendar/email etc.. and permissions to them are provisioned, so that they are available at the time of when they needed. We will be testing this with one part of our business this year which will result in a run rate of around 1,000 sites a month, and if successful we will look to expand this for more of the business. So the numbers will grow faster early next year.
- Hello,
It's super challenging for us to create groups/teams w default email assignments. We had a name change, but aren't changing the domain. In creating users, we can simply add the alias. Without this option in groups/teams, it's defaulting to an @ address that isn't our common use. Is there a way to add an alias group email address? - cfiessingerIt hasn't yet.
I've read over and over again that subsites are not recommended for Groups and their modern sites. For most collections that use subsites, how will "Groupification," affect those subsites? Are there any issues we should expect to see for any corresponding subsite? I am concerned that groupification will negatively impact collection subsites.
- Tejas Mehta
Hi Liana,
If a site collection has subsites, you can still connect the top-level site collection to a new Office 365 Group. This process does not change anything structurally to the subsite hierarchy - all site resources will continue to have the same permissions they did prior to the group connection, including subsites.
The main thing to be aware of is that the new Office 365 Group's identity claims will be added to the site collection's SP permission groups (i.e. group owners claim will be added to the site owners permission group, and group members claim to the site members permission group), so if subsites have inherited permissions from the root, the group owners and members will have the appropriate permissions there. If permissions inheritance was broken and the SP groups for site owners and members were removed, then the side effect you would see is that anyone added to the Office 365 group's owners or members would not have access to the site.
Hope this helps.
Tejas
LianaJohnson wrote:
I've read over and over again that subsites are not recommended for Groups and their modern sites. For most collections that use subsites, how will "Groupification," affect those subsites? Are there any issues we should expect to see for any corresponding subsite? I am concerned that groupification will negatively impact collection subsites.
- Hi Christophe,
Any update re. timing of SC link to groups?
Thanks,
JC cfiessinger will "Groupifying" a SharePoint site be a admin controlled feature? If not, this will completely change how we manage our SharePoint Online environment.
- Tejas Mehta
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:
cfiessinger will "Groupifying" a SharePoint site be a admin controlled feature? If not, this will completely change how we manage our SharePoint Online environment.
- Is there any update here? "Later this year" was almost 10 months ago.
Hi,
Happy new year all.
Anyone can point me to a doc that summarizes the current state of "groupification"?
What methods and source templates are supported, not supported, recommended, known limitations, etc?
Thanks!
JC
What's the status for the solution and resources for this?
I'm guessing, and also this is a very technical answer that might take some re-reading to comprehend, but I think the answer is ...
"The square root of diddly squat."
