Disconnect Teams from Groups

[Paul Cantea]

One of the biggest requests I get from users is the ability to create Teams without creating an associated Office 365 group. Is this functionality planned?

[#2]

Great question. We can't really dissociate a team from a group, but we are working with the Office 365 Groups team to create more flexibility around where/how the group manifests, e.g. only in Teams but not in Outlook.

[#3]

Or, in our case, since we are a few months away yet from any kind of Exchange Online presence, will Teams function without much issue if Exchange is still fully on-prem? (Therefore, we don't get Groups in our Office 365 at the moment.)

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[#4]

Since Groups are the foundation for a Team, I would suspect no but one of the moderators may have a good suggestion. Is there a reason they care about the Group being there?

[#5]

Hey Paul,

Out of curiosity why do you not want the associated Group?

[#6]

HI Sherman!  How are you.  If Exchange is on prem you will not have the meeting icon that shows you your integration to your calendar.  Other than that the core collaboration feature will work just fine.  

[#7]

Hey Dan, Nice talking to you from Ignite, my issues with Groups and Teams being connected is people get confused with the "Conversations" terms that exist all over for example SharePoint sites, etc. When Teams practically takes over the "Conversation" part of the whole stack for the Group. So for example in top right of SharePoint group page "Group Conversations", should either remove that or make it so we can pick our Primary conversation options so it takes us to Teams instead, same with the now default "Conversations" quick launch Item. Think there could maybe be some kind of clean up with that gap there.

[#8]

Hey Karuana! The plan is to move Exchange fully online or at least hybrid, so I'm not worried about that. But moving forward, I'd like to get my client to start moving away from Skype. However, they are still using some kind of system integrated with Skype for external calling. Or maybe it is Skype itself, I'm not 100% sure yet. More to dig into. :)

[#9]

I would agree with this request, but it seems the opposite is happening. SharePoint team sites are getting integrations with Groups.. So is this a case of, we need to look to embrace groups more?

[#10]

Yes, Teams works fine with Exchange on-premises. We create the group, group site, etc. even if user mailboxes are on-premises.

[#11]

Christopher - yes, totally get the overload and pollution of the address book and site space. We just met with some of the Groups folks to talk about how to specify that a group is associated with a specific app (like Teams) and thus doesn't show up in the others, unless actively searched for. Still under planning but I think we'll get to this relatively soon.