It’s time to start bringing the power of Office 365 Groups to your classic team sites! Last year at Ignite, we shared our plans to provide the ability to connect existing SharePoint team sites to new Office 365 Groups. Starting today, we are rolling out the first part of this feature, providing the ability for tenant admins to connect existing SharePoint Online classic team sites to new groups.
This feature will be made available in two stages:
Stage 1: Tenant admin tools
Initially, tenant and global administrators will be able to use an API or PowerShell cmdlet to connect existing SharePoint Online classic team sites to new groups. These tools are being rolled out now and should be available in your tenant over the next few days.
Stage 2: User experience for site collection administrators
Later in May, we will allow site collection administrators to connect sites to new groups using a command on the Settings menu in classic team sites.
When the user experience ships, its visibility will be managed by a tenant-level setting. By default, the new experience will be available to site collection administrators. A tenant administrator can change the setting to hide the command from the Settings menu. We are shipping the administrative setting as part of Stage 1, so a tenant administrator can determine the visibility of the Settings menu command before it rolls out.
How should I prepare for this feature
- Use the SharePoint modernization scanner tool to assess the readiness of the site collections in your tenant for this feature. This tool is a great resource to plan out your site modernization strategy and will create an in-depth report, including areas that need attention prior to running the feature. The tool and instructions for its use are here.
- If you would like to enable site collection administrators to connect classic sites to groups with the command on the Settings menu when we make it available, you don’t need to do anything. If, however, you would like to disable this option, you will need to change the default setting. Details on how you can change this setting can be found here. Note that tenant and global admins will always have the ability to connect sites to groups using the PowerShell cmdlet or API.
Resources
- Review the administrator documentation, which includes instructions on changing the user interface availability for this feature
- SharePoint modernization scanner tool to prepare your classic team sites for modernization
- PowerShell cmdlet documentation for Set-SPOSiteOffice365Group
- API documentation:
Call to action
If you are a tenant or global admin, we’d love for you to give this feature a try as soon as it is available in your tenant in the next few days! Start by reviewing the documentation above, run the scanner tool in your environment, pick some classic sites to test, and run them through this feature.
Please share comments, feedback and your questions below!
Thanks!
Tejas