UPDATE: Create Office 365 Groups with team sites from SharePoint home moving beyond First Release

Microsoft

We recently completed the worldwide rollout for Office 365 Groups getting full-powered SharePoint team sites at the end of January 2017.  Our next step is to now bring the ability to create SharePoint team sites connected to Office 365 Groups from SharePoint home beyond First Release. This next phase of rollout will begin today, and is expected to reach all customers worldwide over the next month. We also wanted to share some of the additional capabilities we’ve added to group-connected team sites since we first began roll out to First Release.

Create Office 365 Group-connected team sites from SharePoint homeCreate Office 365 Group-connected team sites from SharePoint home

No matter where you create an Office 365 Group from – whether SharePoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or elsewhere – you consistently get the full collaborative power of a connected SharePoint Online team site among the other services groups provides (shared inbox, shared calendar, Planner plan, team notebook, and more).

 

This move beyond First Release includes the capabilities described in our November blog post:

  • Fast creation of sites connected to Office 365 Groups from the SharePoint home page
  • Editable team site home pages that look great at your desk and on your phone
  • Modern creation panels for new libraries and lists
  • In-place navigation editing
  • Site settings panels for editing site information and site permissions
  • Modern page creation in classic sites
  • Admin controls for team site creation

The site permissions panel listed above has been enhanced to include options for adding members to the site’s Office 365 Group or simply sharing only the team site without providing access to other group resources.

 

The panel is intended to provide simple permissions management, but also includes a link to ‘Advanced permission settings’ for site owners that have a need to do things like add custom SharePoint permissions & mappings.

Site permissions management panelSite permissions management panel

 

Note this panel also allows you to add users or groups to the ‘Site Visitors’ permissions group, so it is easy to provide read-only access to the site.  All you need to do is add a new person or group via the ‘Invite people’ button, and then change their permission level to ‘Read’.  The user or group’s permission level determines which permission group they appear under – those with ‘Read’ permission will appear in the ‘Site Visitors’ category.

 

Changing permission levels directly in panelChanging permission levels directly in panel

 

Managing group-connected team sites

Since new team sites are connected to Office 365 Groups, managing them involves possible interactions with Office 365 Group settings in addition to those provided by SharePoint.  Examples include settings that apply to groups such as whether group creation is allowed in the tenant, which users are permitted to create groups, usage guidelines URL or group classification labels. Once the group-connected site is created, management of the site is likewise split between Azure Active Directory (AAD) PowerShell cmdlets and the SharePoint Online Management Shell.  Anything dealing with creation, deletion, un-delete (restore) or membership happens through AAD.  SharePoint-specific management, such as storage quota and link sharing policies, take place using the SharePoint management tools.

 

For governing modern site creation, this support page details the administrative controls, but is useful to summarize the relationship between a group’s policy settings and how the SharePoint ‘Create site’ experience behaves.  By default, if group creation is enabled in the tenant, the ‘Create site’ command will appear on SharePoint home, and if a user is permitted to create groups they will get the site creation experience.  If the user is *not* permitted to create groups, they will get the classic self service provisioning experience that results in the creation of a subsite.  The table below describes how the combination of group and site creation settings work together:

 image.png

  * The current user is considered to have group creation permissions if the AAD property EnableGroupCreation is true, or it is false but the user is a member of the security group assigned to the GroupCreationAllowedId AAD property.   

** Site creation is enabled via SharePoint Admin Center under Site creation settings:

Site creation settings in SharePoint Admin CenterSite creation settings in SharePoint Admin Center 

In addition to managing site creation, we are also enabling the SharePoint Online PowerShell cmdlets to administer modern, group-connected site collections.  This means that modern team site collections can now be enumerated with the Get-SPOSite cmdlet with the following example:

 

              Get-SPOSite -Template GROUP#0 -IncludePersonalSite:$false

 

Most parameters for these site collections can also be set using the Set-SPOSite cmdlet, with the exception of those that would result in breaking connection with their corresponding Office 365 Group (e.g. you cannot set the Owner property using this cmdlet – you would need to set the Group’s owners via AAD).  Please refer to the respective documentation for each of the above cmdlets for additional details.  For more information on using PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups, this article may be helpful as well.

 

What else is new?

In addition to the above, this phase of the rollout includes a couple of previously unannounced capabilities.

 

The first is a group membership management experience that lives in SharePoint itself.  Now, when you click on the member count of the group in the site header, you will be presented with a new group membership panel that allows you to add members and change their roles between owners and members, or remove them outright.  Users will no longer need to jump to Outlook to manage the group’s membership.

Group membership management panelGroup membership management panel 

 

The second is Content Type Hub syndication – modern sites can now consume content types that have been published from a central content type hub.  We heard feedback that this is an important feature to enable, and we are including it in this rollout.

 

As noted above, this rollout will take place over the course of a few weeks.  We are very excited for you to take advantage of modern, connected team sites and look forward to any feedback or questions you may have.  As always, please ask in a reply to this thread. 

 

Thanks,
Tejas

76 Replies

+1 for Brent's suggestion to make Contribute the default!!!

Thanks for the info Tejas. The one tenant we manage has yet to receive the modern permission panel update as they're on Standard Release. I do see the panel in our own First Release tenant environment though and it's great - really appreciate these recent updates!

We'll wait on the rollout of the updates. Thanks again!

We also are working on guidance about the proper approach to the defualt document library.  In general, as we discussed at Ignite, we advise allowing the default team site library to run with default settings etc.  Highly intricate folder structures, use of mandatory metdata, content type overrides,  alsong with bespoke security, is best reserved for additional document libraries on those sites to be used alongside the default; or in sites reserved for that level of control where Teams, Planner, etc, will not be primary toolsets for those team sites.

When I click Create New Site the classic form appear how can I activate the new creation experience?

Hi,

 

On regular sharepoint team sites we usually change the "Site owners" from Full Control to Design or Approve. In order for them to be able to manage the site security we make the "Site Owners group" the Owner of the other 2, 3 or whatever amount of groups on the site. Then we expose the Site Users web part on the home page. This way they can click and add/remove users to the right spot without going into Site settings, changing things and breaking permissions on librariels/files etc. This proves to work nicely with all users no matter their level of SharePoint knowledge. I would love to see this or similar in these new Group team sites.  

Hi @OUSSAMA ZEBAR - check your admin settings to verify that you're using a hybrid or new experience (for details on these settings check out the following help article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-site-creation-in-SharePoint-Online-e72844a3-0171-47c...) - though it's possible you're not seeing the new experience yet because we haven't fully deployed the release to everyone. Check your settings and if they are correct then stay tuned; we'll be expanding the release this week. Thanks!

Has their been any thought or as has anyone been able to integrate Active Directory Security Groups into Office 365 Groups?   We would find this feature extremely useful in our upcoming projects.

Hi @Daniel Dysinger - do you mean referencing security groups to add those members to an Office 365 Group? Adding @Mike McLean (OFFICE) for notice/comment.

Is it also possible to change the site template of the site that is created when you create an Office 365 group? We would like to use Groups (and their related teamsite) for projects, and want to have some default libraries with views and content types on all of the Group-connected teamsites.

 

Is this possible and if not, will this be possible in the (near) future?

Hi @Reindert de Kok - no, we don't allow you to change the current template, but we are working out details to customize/extend the template at creation time to better meet your specific business needs. We'll share more details on this front soon. For more detail on what's currently supported to customize the "modern" experiences be sure to check out our recently published series of MSDN articles on this topic: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/modern-experience-customizations  

So with all of the above in mind, is it possible to have it set so external users (guests) an edit files, but cannot delete them?

 

If so, how is this achieved?

Yes we would like our AD to drive the security of the group not individual users so we have a central source of management. We are planning on implementing thousands of groups and management could become a nightmare.

Does this new strategy for creating Office 365 groups through SharePoint adhere to any of the group naming policies set in Exchange?  Since this is currently the only avenue for controlling O365 group names at the moment, I'd be concerned about users being able to subvert policy by finding this alternate entry point.

It looks like when I do this my settings for allowing external users does not follow into the Team group/Sharepoint Site setup.  I am unable to add external users any which way.

@Casey O'Neil

The default for Groups is Allow sharing only with the external users that already exist in your organization’s directory. You can change the default using PowerShell.

See https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-external-sharing-for-your-SharePoint-Online-environm...

Now when I click "Create site", it automatically guide me thru the steps to create a team site integrated with O355 group.  Is it still possible to create a traditional sharepoint site?  If yes what is the procedure?  Thanks.

The "Create Site" is managed by your SharePoint Administrator (in the SharePoint Settings) - additionally, classic SharePoint Sites should be able to be created from the SiteCollections Administration menu.

Hi Ivan,

 

Thanks.  Actually I am the administrator myself.  I found below setting and after I change it to the third button "A classic site", I can create a traditional site now.  

 

It's just a bit confusing because the default setting is "A site with an Office365 group or a classic site", which I expect it will let me choose either one.  But indeed when I click "create site" it just assume I am creating an O365 group site without ever give me a choice.

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