Provision O365 Groups with custom SharePoint site template possible?

Thank you for letting me know - I'll take a look.

Nick Handel wrote

... Through this exercise I also learned that each Office365 Group creates an entire site collection, and that site collection is outside the scope of the "Site Collections" view in Sharepoint admin.  

You can now see those site collections that have been created for a Group in the new Admin Centre. I have it in Preview and it is looking good.

Further update if it's of interest - I found that I couldn't apply this label to the site collection itself - it seems that it only decodes the {Version} label correctly when you apply the policy to a content type within a doc library.  I get an identical page from "Site Content Types" in the top level Site Settings page for the Group Site Collection, but when I try to apply the {Version} label it tells me "The label reference, Version, could not be found." 

I'm sure there is a solution with templates but for now I can live with applying this change to each doc library when I create them.

Through this exercise I also learned that each Office365 Group creates an entire site collection, and that site collection is outside the scope of the "Site Collections" view in Sharepoint admin.  

I am frankly astonished that MS has managed to make this whole thing work so satisfactorily, in the main.  It strikes me that the complexity of integrating all these products together in a self-managed environment is staggering.  Easy to criticise - it is frustrating, for example, that I have nowhere to look for ALL SP site collections as an administrator, but one has to be impressed by the sheer will and effort that's gone into all these things.   Would be nice, though, if they could make Group sites default to the correct locale settings...

Steven Collier I've answered my own question by further exploration of the myriad settings pages, and a bit of more targeted Googling.

Site Collection Features -> Site Policy -> activate.  The "Information management policy settings" link then appears in the library settings in my Group site Document Libraries and I can enable labels, and the magic {Version} label and expose the SP doc version in Word.  

Now I just need to tinker with the level at which I can apply this so it automatically works on any new doc library that gets created anywhere in my O365 world.

I have a related requirement (I think) which I'm hoping for some advice with (I'm no SP expert).

I have found it extremely useful to configure a label called {Version} against the Document Content Type in a SP document library such that I can then expose this as a QuickPart in a Word document.  This works like a charm in the Team Site document library created automatically when I originally subscribed to O365 a few years ago.  It allows me to display the SP document version number in the Word document itself, and is automatically updated.

I then found Office365 Groups extremely useful for external client projects - it provides an email address the client can use to contact the team, a document library, a calendar etc.  However, the document library that is created by default with a site created with an O365 Group differs from my Team Site doc library, and indeed from one which I get when I create a sub-site from that Team Site in Sharepoint directly.  Specifically, under "General Settings" the former is missing Metadata navigation settings and Per-location view settings (no drama there), but critically, under "Permissions and Management", there is no link to "Information management policy settings", which is what I used to add the label to the Document content type.

Not even vaguely knowledgable about Sharepoint as you can probably tell, but this little feature (to expose the Sharepoint version number in a Word doc) is invaluable and it's extremely frustrating not to be able to get it to work in Group site document libraries.  Might this be solved by applying a different template to the default site that's created with the group as detailed in your blog?

Thanks

NIck

Yes, but you need to know to trigger it. Site Designs apply automatically, you can even use them to trigger a Flow that could then use the SharepPoint PnP Powershell to customise the site further than is possible in Site Designs.