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Hybrid deployment and on-prem Office Group Ownership

Brass Contributor

Is there any roadmap on enabling Group ownership for on prem users?  I know it's not possible today, but would like to know when / if it is coming...

13 Replies
Chad can you please provide more details about the use case/scenario?

Our mailboxes are currently still on premises and we are looking at Office 365 as a collaboration platform where we can share dcouments and have conversations with our customers in an ad-hoc way.  Today it seems that we need to migrate mailboxes in order for people to own groups and read the messages in the threads even though there are + buttons to create a group that people can see, and then they get informed they have to have a mailbox to create the group.

Have the same use case with 30K users and a longer term effort to move mailboxes but all collab in o365.  With the exchange online license disabled and no mailbox, users can't add folks to the group without using planner or the mobile app which have been the two work arounds we've found.  Especially with the link from team sites to conversations this may be a worse experiance

Yes, the lack of access to the shared mailbox components (discussion threads, calendar, tasks) are also major inhibitors to making the groups a feature to promote.  Instead I have departments actively pursuing various third party products like HighQ, where they don't need their email on the cloud to collaborate...

Great arguments to accelerate the transition to Office 365 then :)

Really, it's giving our various departments great arguements that "Microsoft's product is not polished" and justifying their alternatives.

Not sure I understand your comment, Office 365 Groups are natively integrated will all key apps in O365: Outlook, SharePoint, Planner, OneNote, Skype for Business, Power BI and soon Yammer.

Yes, but as our employees try to use groups and run into things where it directs people to pages where they just get error screens because they don't have mailboxes, and they can't see the threads that the person sitting next to them can, they view all of Office 365 as unpolished.

I think that given that there is hybrid guidance for using Groups and Groups are such a fundimental part of office 365 using hybrid exchange (which there are companies who will be there for a variety of reasons) it would still make sense to enable groups as a collaboration experiance.  All we're really talking about is having the shared mailbox experiance not require an exchange online license since it's necessary for folks who may have mail elsewhere.

David, is this a licensing concern?

best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

@Christophe Fiessinger We are in the same situation. We are ready to give access to OneDrive and SharePoint Online and would like to leverage groups features but mailboxes are not migrated to O365 and the Exchange administrators are not ready for that.

 

We can start to assign licenses, that is not the issue. Exchange owners still need to figure out all the impacts of moving mailboxes on the mail retentions, shared mailboxes, public folders...

 

I found that, if we enable Teams on a group, members can be managed in the Teams UI. It's a workaround but some other features are missing or links lead to error pages. 

 

Any way to start using Groups while doing a gradual migration of mailboxes or it's a big bang thing?

 

Thanks

@Christophe Fiessinger can you tell me if it's possible to use all groups feature in hybrid mode or point me to someone who can answer?

 

Thanks.

We now have people requesting Slack.  It seems Slack does not require us to move mailboxes to Office 365...  Groups should be able to stand alone in order to compete directly with the marketplace...

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Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

@Christophe Fiessinger We are in the same situation. We are ready to give access to OneDrive and SharePoint Online and would like to leverage groups features but mailboxes are not migrated to O365 and the Exchange administrators are not ready for that.

 

We can start to assign licenses, that is not the issue. Exchange owners still need to figure out all the impacts of moving mailboxes on the mail retentions, shared mailboxes, public folders...

 

I found that, if we enable Teams on a group, members can be managed in the Teams UI. It's a workaround but some other features are missing or links lead to error pages. 

 

Any way to start using Groups while doing a gradual migration of mailboxes or it's a big bang thing?

 

Thanks

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