ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages

Microsoft

Today marks the beginning of bringing the full power of SharePoint to Office 365 Groups, with additional benefits to SharePoint Online all up! New and existing groups will get modern team sites, which come with an updated Home page, the ability to pin items within the new Quick links web part, and to see what's going on in the site via the new Activity web part. 

 

These team sites within Office 365 Groups, and existing team sites throughout SharePoint Online, will also have the ability to create publishing pages - fast, easy to author pages that support rich multimedia content, and look great on mobile browsers and via the SharePoint mobile app. Get ready to communicate and share your ideas within SharePoint like never before.

 

Additionally, Microsoft will increase the site collection limit in SharePoint Online to "up to 25TB" (previously "up to 1TB); this will be refelcted in an update to the official "SharePoint Online boundaries and limits" support article.

 

Please review the associated blog on blogs.office.com, "New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups" with numerous links to new and updated support.office.com articles.

 

SharePoint_ModernTeamSite-Home_MAIN.png

 

Let us know what you think,

Mark

207 Replies
There are no plans to convert classic pages to modern pages - we probably will never do it. You can create classic pages alongside modern pages inside the same Pages library.

Under the covers it's a full-powered SharePoint team site - so yes. And no news on branding beyond the new look & feel of the home page for Office 365 Groups team sites. We're thinking in this area with a few things to share at Ignite 2016 timeframe.

Appreciate the blog post/update, and the replies here @Mark Kashman

 

>SharePoint home, where you create a new subsite today
>still possible to create a default team site from the Sharepoint Online admin center

 

In both of the above what is created is a Site Collection. I know it's sort of a nit-pick if you're using high-level terminology, but it's also true that for many of us that's an important detail/difference. I hope that the language in the Ignite materials were be precise in this respect. 

 

>SharePoint home, where you create a new subsite today

I'd be curious if you have any stats on how many companies have disabled that (we have). Though I suspect many of us will un-disable it since self-creation with Groups amounts to the same effect. Smiley Happy

Have there been any improvements to the authoring canvas?

We've had a lot of pain and suffering with Delve blogs due to the limitations for text formatting, especially for users who wanted more control over font size/monospaced fonts. We've also discovered and reported a bug that if you have Doc-ID enabled a site collection then the New Authoring Canvas can't resolve the URL (so, inserting docs doesn't work).

We also have modern Doc Libraries disabled due to a major issue with non-require metadata and content types (see this post).  We've been looking forward to Modern Team site and group integration for a while, but I'm hoping it isn't plagued by significant issues.  

FYI for "up to Today":

1. "create site" creates a subsite in an IT-chosen site collection; unless they developed a custom solution to do otherwise (there is a custom solution in GitHub that does this :-)).

2. New private site collection created from within SPO admin center = unique, new site collection.

 

And "tomorrow" when you "create site" from SharePoint home, it'll be a new site collection for the Group, primarily exposed via "Files" and "Site" from the group nav.

Thanks. I really am just confused about where I should build going forward. I'm currently redesigning my team site template, and if I have to use groups to get the "soon to be" feature set, I'll just do that.

Thanks. Can't wait for Ignite.
Hi Lincoln,

My sites aren't highly customized beyond some web parts I don't even need. Some of my templated sites are already using the modern libraries and lists, but I like the new "modern" home page to bring the look and navigation together. Right now, the home page (and settings pages) look completely different from the lists and libraries. I'd like to stop that.

Further, I'm rebuilding all my sites right now (I'm about a year into our rollout, and have learned a lot / need to adapt). What I really need is the ability to generate the full "modern" build including home page. If that includes creating a group, I'll create a group. No problem there. I think there just needs to be more documentation as to what is changing, what is staying the same, and what paths (SharePoint Admin, Subsites, O365 Groups) lead to the same place.

Thanks.

Makes sense. 

 

For the time being, the easiest way to do what you want is to just create a new modern page, add the Quick Links and Activity web parts to it (or any other web parts!) and set that as the homepage of your site using the "Make Homepage" command in the Pages library.  Give that a try when the new bits hit your environment and let us know how it goes.

We're first release, so I'll start checking tomorrow!

Rollout will begin next week.

I've seen "next week" and Sept 2nd.... I suppose it really doesn't matter too much.......

Adding to this, is how to recognise whether this is an officially provisioned team site or a user provisioned group team site?
And can we see more to the Delve blogs while we are at it. It sorely lacks meta-data capabilities like tags and categories. We need to know when to let go of old SharePoint Blog Site and embrace new Delve Blogs.

@Mark Kashman If we have disabled user self-service site creation, then will it affect the groups-connected-site creation as well?

Hello,

 

it is not related to SharePoint tenant space and size. We still need to purchase the space for our SharePoint tenant if it reaches its limit. Is this correct?

Hi, This sounds great! But I'd love to get some steer from Microsoft about what they see the purposes of Team Sites vs Groups are. It seems like they are getting closer and closer together in functionality. Some examples of when you see each being used would be great.

Is the name Groups disapearing later?
Do you need the office graph enabled for the Activity feed to work?

@Mark Kashman, I am also a little confused by the path this has been taking.

 

See, earlier we had SharePoint Team Sites which would provision a shared notebook, team calendar, shared documents library, and a site mailbox automatically. Add in people with appropriate permissions and it became a group. 

 

Now, the route is to create an O365 Group first, which would then provision a shared notebook, team calendar, shared documents library, group mailbox, and very soon a team site, automatically.

 

What really is the difference? I mean apart from an entry-point in Outlook.