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

I guess "what's in a name?" - the mobile app is currently known as Outlook Groups!

what will the groups app give us over the sharepoint app or the onedriveforbusiness app and why do I have to have 3 different apps for the same things?

Yes - for SharePoint homepage from the waffle menu will only display SharePoint site cards without any document activity related feeds- screenshot attached.

 

sharepoint-activity-feed.PNG

 

 

@Chirag Patel (sorry how do I do the @ sign thing. Does it not work in quick reply?)
I didn't mean the SharePoint Homepage, I was curious about Team Homepages. I assume "Activities" won't work on a new Team Site page when the graph is disabled?

Hi Mark,

 

for those of us who have created a custom solution to create sites from the + Create site link in the now SharePoint (previously Sites) page, will that still be supported in the future?

 

Will there be any support for the same when creating Groups/Team Sites?

 

We have create the custom solution so that we limit the number of people who can create sites via our application and also so we can add value to the sites by configuring them and also allowing us to add data classification, ownership and auditing etc. Will this type of scenario be catered for in the future for team sites and for groups?

Hi,

 

25TB sounds great ... but how to manage with a 5.000 items list view threshold?

 

Thanks, Frank

@Lincoln DeMaris / @Mark Kashman, what is the latest on "publishing" structured navigation being supported in new modern sites/pages and libraries/lists?

 

Last I heard from Yammer, it was something you were thinking about but there was no firm way ahead.

 

We use this on pretty much EVERY site we have, so not having it will be a huge loss of functionality as soon as we start moving people over to modern stuff. (primarily around menu items with custom permissions).

 

Created a thread specifically to track this issue too: https://network.office.com/t5/SharePoint/Structured-Navigation-Publishing-not-supported-on-quot-Mode...

 

Great answer. I still have a couple of questions though. If we decide to go with Team Sites now, will we ever be able to connect those to some corresponding Office 365 Groups? I mean will we be forever locked to that decision? If so that would make us wait and see before we create any team sites for now.

@Philine von Guretzky (mentions don't work in plain text "quick reply")

 

Correct! Team homepages requires Office Graph enabled for activity analytics.

I'm sure that by the end of the Ignite conference at the end of the month it will be much clearer.

Good question! @Robert Woods 

Not everything is created from SharePoint and more often OneDrive tends to be a starting point for a document lifecycle and eventually will end up in a SharePoint team site or even in Groups! Overall for me they are the endpoints to get to the information relevant to me.

 

I've highlighted the key differentiators between each of the apps.

 

OneDrive app
- lets you work with your personal (OneDrive) and work files (OneDrive For Business)
- access all your OneDrive files and files shared with you

 

SharePoint App
- access to intranet
- quick access to your team sites and the people you work with
- to see the site activity, sites you frequently visit and the sites you follow
- share a site (subject to permissions)
- access to recent and popular files spreasd across multiple document libraries


Outlook Groups (Office 365 Groups) App:
- Easily participate in group email conversations
- Work together using the shared team OneNote's notebook
- Discover and join Office 365 Groups relevant to you

 

Hope this helps.

The purpose of groups is for getting work done together.  SharePoint is one of the tools the group has.  Outlook for mails, calendar for calendar, planner for tasks, SharePoint for files, pages, lists, apps, Flows, PowerApps, etc.

We are working on publishing and managed navigation support on modern pages. Very sorry, but no ETA yet.
We are thinking about how to enable connecting groups to existing sites. It's a very interesting scenario - no ETA, but we're thinking hard about it. The hardest part is figuring out how to reconcile the very simple concept of group membership having access to everything in the group, and potentially very complex permission structures in existing sites.

We are working on updating the "+ Create" button in SharePoint Home to create team sites + groups. By default, New Groups you create through Outlook, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint home will all be the same thing - a group, which includes a team site as one of its workloads.  This will be released before the end of the year. Stay tuned for more details.

 

In time, this experience will be fully customizable, so you can tune what gets provisioned, and who gets to do the provisioning.


@Lincoln DeMaris wrote:
We are thinking about how to enable connecting groups to existing sites. It's a very interesting scenario - no ETA, but we're thinking hard about it. The hardest part is figuring out how to reconcile the very simple concept of group membership having access to everything in the group, and potentially very complex permission structures in existing sites.

 

This has to be a non-starter if you are wanting to do it automated across the board.

 

There are soooo many reason why every site doesnt need an O365 Group.

 

In our environment, I could justify a need maybe for 25% of our sites, and that is being generous.  Everything else is set up with very specific permissions in mind like you said.

 

If there is some kind of manual way to create a O365 Group for a Site, or apply an existing O365 Group, or multiple groups to an existing site, then I could get behind that.

 

I would much rather migrate my stuff from an existing SP Site to an O365 Group+SP Site (as the need arose) than have billions of orphaned/not needed Groups and Sites sitting out there that I didnt want in the first place.

Any chance view / read-only rights will be supported?

Then the question would be: Will the new Home page and the new Publishing pages "break" the branding of a team site, like the new document libraries have done?

Yes - the limitations of the new homepage and new publishing pages are the same as the limitations in modern lists and libraries, at least as far as branding is concerned.

Thanks for the answer! If that is the case, will we then also be able to disable the new home page and the new publishing pages until we are given the relevant branding / custom tools?