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

This is great news. I just want to know the following, as I tweeted at Jeff Teper earlier. 

 

Hey @jeffteper when the full rollout of modern team sites occurs, will there be any difference between a previous SP Team Site + New Group?

We currently have modern doc libs and lists disabled (as they break customization and the top menus are too wonky for us right now), will that prevent this from rolling out to us (first release whole org)?
Great news! A 25TB limit for site collections is great, but what about increasing the "Storage base per tenant" up from the laughable 1 TB and only 500 MB per user? Then we have to pay $0.20/GB/month or ~$200/TB/month to increase storage? This is quite expensive for a video production company like us.

"$0.20/GB/month or ~$200/TB/month to increase storage "

 

We were quoted $114k for 50TB for a year.... Definately started looking away from SharePoint for anything but collaborative business data when we heard that!

How soon can we create a modern page on an existing SharePoint Online team site?
How will the end users get notifed on this changes? Especially to exisiting sites and groups.
Will this work side-by-side with the old publishing pages, or what about converting teh traditional pages to the new pages?

The foundational element of both is a SharePoint Online team site. For the modern team site connected to groups, it is adding new fuinctionality (home page, Quick links, Activity, integration with Office 365 Groups, etc.). Today and going forward, any new group gets a site. And coming soon will be the reverse, any new team site gets a group. And today, if you create a new group from within Outlook, that group gets a site. There will be methods from the SharePoint Online admin center where IT/admins can create standalone team sites from the admin console - these wouldn't be connected to Groups. And, existing team sites don't yet have the option to take on the modern home page; this is in the works.

 

You're asking the right questions and we'll have more to say on this next phase of development in/at the Ignite 2016 timeframe.

At a platform level, both new and existing team sites are the same. The main difference is that team + groups comes with the new home page, the Quick Links and Activity modern web parts and the integration with Office 365 Groups for Files and Site within the apps Office 365 Groups provides membership to (the others being Conversations, Calendar, Notebook, Planner, etc.).

 

We are working at wiring up all Groups entry points - the big one for us is the SharePoint home, where you create a new subsite today, soon you will generate a unique site collection connected to Office 365 Groups. This is already in place for other entry points - like from within Outlook.

 

It is still possible to create a default team site from the Sharepoint Online admin center. These wouldn't have a connection to Office 365 Groups.

 

At the Ignite 2016 conference (end of Spet.2016), we'll have more to share for what it means for existing team sites to add access and control with Office 365 Groups membership, plus bringing the new home page and modern web parts.

 

Thanks,

Mark

It shouldn't; not during this phase, as it applies only to new and existing groups - which only have had the Files portion enabled (aka, the modern document library) for the Group. If you are using Office 365 Groups, you'll soon see "Site" added to the groups apps list. This is a new site for the group; not an existing team site. And going forward, when you create a new group, here too you would get a new, modern team site for the group.

 

In the future we do want to enable the choice for existing team sites to have the new home page applied as the default home page. And we are concious of configuration and extensibility requirements. We'll have more to share at the Ignite 2016 timeframe.

 

Hope that helps for now,

Mark

We do understand the financials, and have consistently over time provided more storage as the default amount. To be clear, we did not up the amount of storage provided in this round as it was to increase the site collection limit - a common ask for information architecture. And we take your feedback and balance it with what the team has lined up next on the roadmap in parallel to the true costs of storage and balance on our end.

We will begin rolling out to First Release next week. And then some weeks/months out to broader production.

The mecahnism for creating a new page in an existing team site is unchanged. When they click on the gear icon in the upper right and choose "Create new page" they'll be greeted with the new authoring canvas and new web parts in the toolbox.

 

And team site is all up new for Groups, with one added entry point from the home page to create a new page from under the site title. From the Group navigation, they'll see "Site" which takes them to the new modern home page for the group.

Not yet. The team is working on a plan to enable modern page creation for sites leveraging the publishing infrastructure. It is one area we chose to hold rollout so we can make it seamless and not step over existing page publishing processes. More to come soon about our approach here. Your feedback is welcome if you have thoughts or concerns we can share with the team...

So @Mark Kashman, does this mean then that we can now provision Content Types and Site Columns to Office 365 Groups? Also any new on the Branding side of things?

Interesting news - we've been struggling with the puzzle about how to recommend a group or a site for our end users - this might have gotten a little easier now. Looking forward to testing this and assessing the value.

Thanks.

Joe, are you asking if if all team sites that exist today will end up looking like brand new team site + groups provisioned in the new way?

 

We won’t ever replace your existing customized classic pages with modern pages.  We want to offer the new homepage as an option, especially for team sites that haven’t customized their homepage.  We don’t have a plan for “upgrading” or “converting” classic pages with classic web parts into modern pages – that’s upgrading content and is basically impossible.  You can always create a modern page inside any team site, put the Quick links and Activity web parts on it, and enjoy the benefits of the new homepage :)

 

"Modern team sites” aren't a radically new thing.  They’re just team sites, with more and more of the apps inside sporting new modern experiences – homepage, pages, documents, lists, site contents, and more coming.  Every team site that exists today is a “modern team site” because of the modern experiences we’ve already shipped. 

Nope! If you have modern lists and libraries turned off, you'll still get this change. When you navigate to the team site associated with a group, you'll be able to create and use lists and libraries there, and they'll use the classic UI as you'd expect.
These capabilities will begin rolling out to first release users next week. When the modern page capability is flighted to you or your tenancy, this affects existing team sites, and "new" sites that are associated with groups.