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
What about Yammer, which we have embedded in our team sites. I outline some alternatives: 1) Will Yammer replace the newsfeed as the out-of-the-box social feed in sites 2) Will a Yammer feed still be embeddable as today. 3) Will Yammer be a web part that we will have access to via the new publishing pages, or 4) Do you have any other kind of integration between sites and Yammer in mind?

@Allan With Sørensen exactly the situation I am in now. I need all the functionality of Groups, I love them. But I use Team Sites because I need the ability to add Content Types and Site Columns specifically. Now you can add both of these to the Groups Library but.....

 

When a Group is provisioned the Site Collection for that Group is not provisioned until someone clicks on the Files Link. After someone click the files link then the Site Collection is spun up and you can add CTypes and Columns.

 

If there was a way to provision the Group Site Collection at the time the Group is created then that be be brilliant, and I can do away with Team Sites all together.

If the site collection is created at the time of Group creation, or at the time of first use, what is the meaningful difference? If it's there when you try to use it, does it matter when it was created?

Yeah it does, because I want to add Content Types and Site Columns at the time of provisioning and before members start uploading documents. I do not want users to have to click the files link to have the site collection provisioned.

 

At present I would need to manually click the files link then add the CTypes and Columns.

This is great, but will you have videos of the samples you show in your blog so we can actually pause and look at it. I was trying to show it to some users and we had to watch it cycle through 3 or 4 times to catch what was going on.

Looking forward to this feature. It really helps get rid of the confusion of Groups vs. SharePoint. I look at it as a way to integrate a lot of functionality together.

@Mark Kashman with respect to customizing the site URL mentioned in the comments of the blog post, this is not quite "vanity" per se, but a desire to keep the URLs tidy. Even when the sites are standalone and not in a site structure (where 256 path names make short URLs very important).

 

e.g. Team Name is Emerging Technologies and Social Collaboration

They may want the URL to be "emsc" 

 

At least group URLs don't include @%20 in the URLs. That's a super (long-overdue) positive step for sure. 

Great news. Could someone please clarify if and how the root SharePoint Site Collection (domain.sharepoint.com) will be affected by this, for example if its still untouched?

Will this also get group features?

That is great to hear. In our case, we're specifically designing our solution around the simplest possible permissions structure, as in having a single security group containing the members that would have access to a given SharePoint site. This is explicitly to make it work as much as o365 groups in the hope of being able to connect to an o365 group down the road with as little work as possible. For us, the option of being able to "upgrade" an existing site so that it could have a connected o365 group, thereby removing any and all custom peromissions, would be a very small problem. Of course I am aware that this probably doesn't apply to everyone, but perhaps it could be rolled out in such a fashion to begin with?
A question for the people in the know. How will the new Group Sites handle permissions. Will we be able to set different permission levels on a library basis, like on a SharePoint site? Will we be able to use the Group Admin level in our permissions, sort of like Site Owners - Site Members - Site Visitors? Thanks!

@Joe Fedorowicz Office 365 Groups was always based on SharePoint Site Collection (i.e. top level site with one library).

The integration now expands this site into a full-blown SharePoint site as we know it. Therefore, more site ownership controls such as permissions and create other business apps, etc. 

Can an O365 group be deleted and leave the SharePoint site intact?

And vice versa, can the SharePoint site be deleted and leave the O365 Group intact?

I'd really like to see something where you can enable/disable features in an Group/SharePoint site

e.g.
- I want JUST a sharepoint site with no group
- I want a group with no sharepoint site, and planner, and discussion turned on
- I want a group with a sharepoint site
- I want a group with planner turned off, and everything else turned off, just the discussion and document library
etc

Yep, but we are now adding "Group Managers" into the mix. Are they going to live in the "Site Owners" by default? or will they just be members with permissions on the "Group" level?

Will changes be coming to the SharePoint Homepage so users can organize the tiles? Or at least can you have the See All View alpha sort? It's extremely challenging to locate the desired site when you're following a lot. Also, we're still looking for the ability to control the colors.

The implementation of permissions in SharePoint is a nightmare of your own creation. Good luck.

I'd have previously described Team Sites as a 'container', designed to bring everything your team needs together in one place. This used to be a collection of standard apps or experiences built within SharePoint. I think Groups are assuming this role, but are instead acting as a container for Microsoft products built outside of SharePoint. In the process of this happening, Team Sites have effectively been demoted from a container to one of several products that sit within the new container, Groups.

@Joe Fedorowicz currently the permission groups consist of owners, members and visitors. For each of the group, the group name permission object (i.e. test 3) resides in all of the above permission groups - screenshot below.

 

Makes perfect sense to use at least the owners and members group. We'll have await further information as how this will pan out.

 

 

group membership overview.PNGgroup membership.PNG

 

The correct solution is to turn on metadata based navigation, and configure the most important columns as either key filters or hierarchies. That has the effect of making it really easy to create selective queries over large lists, and has built in fallback behavior for times when the user accidently selects too large a data set. The basics for setting that up can be found here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/configure-metadata-navigation-for-a-list-or...

 

We have extensive documentation on designing large lists here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262813.aspx.

 

And finally, it's a known, common concern and the team is rationlizing how we can tackle this in the future.

They will continue to work, and you can switch to our default provisioning if you choose. For now, we won't enable the default team sites + groups provisioning to be extended. Today, you can build your own or use the out-of-box.

They will work, but they won't come from the Graph so it's a bit lesser of an offering. We default to another method to showcase site activity when the Graph is turned off. But my two cents, don't turn it off - you lose a lot of richness and intelligence across Office 365. :)

Each app has a main use case, and certainly some overlap in cases - or hand off from app-to-app when appropriate. SharePoint app = sites & portals access. OneDrive = files management. Groups app = interact with group conversations. The portfolio of apps is always being evaluated and adjustments of how they interact and overlap are expected. Hope that helps, Mark.