Office 365 Group WriteBack - What is the use case?

[Jeremy Hagan]

I've been reading up on this to work out if I need it. From what I can tell it is purely so that Office 365 Groups show up in Outlook for those users whose mailbox is still on-premises. Is this correct? Are there any use cases which I am not getting?

My customer's initial implementation of Office 365 will be to use Teams/Planner and leave all their mailboxes on prem until we can untangle that spaghetti. So give that all the groups will have Teams then users will interact with the through the Teams client and not Outlook.

[#2]

That and mail flow. If your customers wants to leverage group-backed app such as Teams or Planner, he should really consider moving the mailboxes to the cloud.

[#3]

Vasil's point is well made. If you want to use the extended functionality of Office 365 (Teams, Groups, and Planner), then move mailboxes to the cloud first. The experience for on-premises mailboxes will always be inferior to that enjoyed by cloud users.

[#4]

There is actually another use case, at least for us.
We're using SSCM and I can reuse those groups for app deployments 🙂
Example: a self managed group of users should have an app installed on their windows devices. Whenever the group owners adds somebody, the app gets deployed to their device.

[#5]

Inferior is a subjective term. Do you have a link to any documentation which outlines the limitations of the following use cases:
1: End users have on-prem Exchange with no Hybird
2: End users have Hybrid Exchange with on-prem mailboxes
3: End users have O365 mailboxes with Hybrid
4: Exchange is fully in cloud.

These vague assertions are a barrier to adoption. Customers want to know EXACTLY what their end user experience is going to be. Not just that it will be "better" if they migrate to the cloud.

[#6]

That's a question best addressed to Microsoft. I don't write their documentation. We do cover some issues in the chapter on hybrid recipients in the Office 365 for IT Pros ebook, but this is an evolving area and you should probably do your own testing with your own use cases to satisfy yourself as to the right choice for your organization. An example of recent evolution is the support for compliance records captured by Teams for hybrid recipients. https://www.petri.com/teams-compliance-records-hybrid-exchange