What is the future of Groups and SharePoint Team sites?

[Joshua Nash]

Just a question to the community. As Microsoft appears to be moving full steam with development of Groups, and now has many of the same features SharePoint, do we suspect (or know) whether Groups will eventually replace SharePoint, specifically Team sites? And if that is the case, will SharePoint Team sites (and perhaps other types) merge with the Groups model because right now the fragmentation is a bit frustrating!

Our organization has a lot of SharePoint sites, so knowing what the future of our collaboration sites would be very helpful! Thanks in advance!

[#2]

What you are describing was a concern when groups first came out, and the SharePoint site that was deployed with a Group was a "Group Site".

The SharePoint team has completely moved in the opposite direction since.  Have a look at the latest MS Ignite content - the keyword to listen for is "Groupify" where, membership of existing Team Sites gets moved into an Office 365 Group, but we retain the Team Site as the group's site template.

Office 365 Groups should be seen as a security model, a fundamental membership system that is the backbone of not just SharePoint team sites, but also the mailbox, yammer, shared document library, and conversations.

[#3]

Thank you, John. So what I understand from what you've said in your reply is that SharePoint will eventually become Groups, but with retention of some of the formatting? If so, is there any idea when this transition might occur?

[#4]

No groups will be the security model and still be as they are. Just not the focus anymore and security of the new platforms more than just Sharepoint is built on top of groups.

[#5]

So, I think the part that is tricky is what do you mean when you say "Groups"

• Office 365 Groups as the Azure AD membership construct "Unified Groups" - this remains, it is a core building block in Office 365 and backs both the security, membership as well as allow various products to be enabled on an unified group - e.g. you can enable Teams on a O365 Unified Group.
• Group UX through Exchange - this UX isn't going to see much updates.  Would not train users on this too much.  Unless they only live in Exchange/Outlook
• Group Sites - SharePoint online doesn't create Group sites anymore.  Only in the very beginning in preview, and it was very confusing.  Now from SharePoint Home you always get a Team Site backed with a Unified Group.
• Existing Team Sites can be switched to be backed by a Unified Group, instead of SharePoint Groups - this is the process called Groupify
• Groups App in mobile - I don't think there's much investment in this app

What I am probably saying is that Unified Groups will disappear as an user experience and become a backend piece that is invisible to the end user.  It is still very important to developers and IT Pros.  

What do you mean when you say "Groups"?  Are you talking about Unified Group, or are you talking about a specific Product/Experience that's related to a group?

[#6]

SharePoint is not going anywhere. It provides the file storage functionality for many other services, in fact MS recently announced that there will be a SP 2019 version issued for on-premises deployment. 

Groups contain people/accounts and SharePoint is one of many apps that are linked to these Groups. These Groups have many names (modern groups, unified groups, and Azure AD Groups) which causes a lot of confusion. 

Yammer groups are now linked to the O365 groups. Files saved in Yammer will start to be automatically saved to SharePoint in the near future

MS Teams uses SharePoint as its primary method for file storage 

Power BI uses O365 groups to control who can use its dashboards and other items

you may find this infographic from @Deleted helpful, http://icansharepoint.com/everyday-guide-office-365-groups/