IT Assistance Teams/Help Desk for Office 365 Groups

[Eric Adler]

I am a bit challegned with the Office 365 groups and my SharePoint based brain and model for working with team sites in this bold new world where they are the same, sometimes.

In SharePoint we have site collections and a Site Collection admin role. This role has been very helpful as we can add our IT admin accounts and the Help Desk admin accounts to faciliate answering questsions about site issues. We have a very small "SharePoint Team" and they assist users with questions all the time.

As we are now back into the "fun" of flat site architecture and self-service site creation brought back to us by Office 365 Groups is there any best practice for allowing IT assistance teams access to the sites created by Office 365 Groups?

I realize technically these are site collections and it appears the Site Collection Admin group is still there. Is there a way to leverage this to add IT assistance teams into these?

Or, are we saying that we should treat Office 365 Sites like any other client issue? Meaning support teams would need to remote into a users machine to see the content and walk them through troubleshooting?

I must admit, the transition back to this flat, self-service model is challenging. I get that tools like Delve and the SharePoint page are designed to help. But man, it feels like I've taken a bad step into the past with the uncontorlled growth and lack of Inforamtion Architecture/Site Architecture that was often the downfall of many SharePoint installations.

Curious on how others are dealing with support isssues.

Thanks!

eRic

[#2]

Eric, i've had many of the same concerns, issues. Here is how we are handling our implementation and roll out (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Our-Groups-Rollout-part-2/m-p/51922)

For the most part, we are finding great adoption of Groups. Our users are grasping Groups alot easier than if we just gave them a SharePoint site and said go nuts. That being said, we have turned off self-service creation, and are partnering with the business to implement Groups for key workgroups/teams (and migrate/shut off existing SharePoint sites at the same time)

We havent really had to yet, but for group-level support, we will probably just grant SCA rights to the sharepoint site. If we need to support the other group tools, we'll just put ourselves as members of the group temporarily.

(Also Information Architecture is dead) :(

[#3]

Have you then tied the rollout of Planner and Teams with this model?

I do like the high level concept of O365 Groups. Which as I see it is: Define who you work with and you get all of the tools.

Challenge is, of course, cross-team work.

I don't think IA's quite dead. It's limping in Office 365 Groups, but we still have SharePoint for the intranet/publishing side of life!! Go IA! Go Card Sorting!!! :)