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Microsoft SharePoint Blog

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Modernize your SharePoint team sites by connecting them to new Office 365 groups

Microsoft

Jun 06, 2018

SharePoint powers content collaboration in Office 365. At work, it is important for every team member to streamline efforts and stay on the same page. Group-connected SharePoint team sites provide a central location to manage team files, input and connect to important data, and share timely news. With insight into what drives the most engagement and value, people can course correct and optimize for greatest impact.

Users have been adopting modern SharePoint lists and libraries and creating modern pages. And now it’s time to bring the full power of SharePoint and Office 365 to all your sites. We’re excited to announce that you can now further modernize your existing (classic) sites by connecting them to new Office 365 groups.

It is easy to connect your existing SharePoint site to a new Office 365 group. [30-second looping GIF]

This connection also allows you to associate your site to a SharePoint hub site now that it has a modern home page, and the site will look and function better via the SharePoint mobile app.

Connect your existing SharePoint sites to a new Office 365 group

You can connect your site to a new Office 365 group from the user interface site-by-site, which might be good for smaller environments. However, larger customers often want to offer a consistent experience to their users, and therefore want to perform a bulk operation of their sites. Last month, we made tools available for admins to connect existing sites to new Office 365 Groups.

Being able to connect an Office 365 group to an existing SharePoint site is important if you want to modernize that site and provide additional group capabilities to all team members. In addition to using modern pages, lists and libraries already available in your classic sites, once you have connected your site to an Office 365 group, it can benefit from all other shared group-connected apps such as Outlook for a group inbox and calendar, Planner for task management, Microsoft Teams for real-time, persistent chat, and more.

Now, we are expanding this capability to site owners directly from the team sites they own and manage. When enabled in your environment, it’s easy to get started. As a site owner, you can initiate the group connection by selecting Connect to new Office 365 Group from the upper-right site gear menu. Note: if this does not appear, either your tenant does not yet have this capability as it takes several weeks to roll out to all customers, or you are not a site owner of that site.

From an existing (classic) SharePoint site, select "Connect to a new Office 365 Group" from the upper-right gear icon menu to start the process.

This will launch an experience that will guide you step-by-step through the group connection process, where you provide details for the new Office 365 group, including name, email address, members and owners. Upon completion, you will be presented with a new, modern home page created for your site with a new, editable page with new web parts to get you started– including a site activity web part that highlights relevant content actions occurring within your site. The page also includes a new link to the group’s inbox in the left navigation and a header with relevant group information and membership. Plus, when you hover on the team site name at the top, you will see the new group card that gives quick access to other apps and shows more about the group and what’s happening beyond the site.

Rest assured that all your previous content remains in the site, and a link to the previous home page is also added to the site’s navigation. No site left behind, AND no content left behind. Just moving forward!

After stepping through a few wizard-driven steps to add members and owners and adjust settings if needed, you'll be presented with an updated site connected to Office 365 group apps.

Beyond your content, all existing permissions in the site remain the same as well. This ensures that anyone that had access to resources in the site will continue to have them once it is group connected.

The updated Site permissions experience is available to site owners from the upper-right gear icon menu to allow inline management of site permissions and invite others to collaborate.

Get started today!

There is no reason to delay. Start your modernization journey now. Get the most out of the power of SharePoint and Office 365 Groups to boost people productivity across your company.

SharePoint powers content collaboration for the modern workplace, enabling teamwork with team sites connected to Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Planner and more. Whether you call this ‘site modernization,’ ‘groupify’ or ‘no site left behind’ - start connecting your existing SharePoint sites to new Office 365 groups today! You’ll jump for joyify for sure.

Thanks,

Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, SharePoint team - Microsoft

FAQs and additional, related resources below…

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: How can I expect connecting existing SharePoint sites to new Office 365 Groups to roll out to Office 365 customers?

A: The ability to connect existing SharePoint sites to new Office 365 Groups Communication sites will begin to roll out to all Targeted Release customers this week, and will be completed within 2–3 weeks. We then are targeting end of July 2018 for complete worldwide roll out into production.

Q: What types of sites can I connect to new Office 365 Groups?

A: You can connect top-level site collections that use the team site web template (also known as STS#0). You cannot group-connect subsites.

Q: What permissions do I need to have to connect my existing site to a new group?

A: Site collection administrators of the existing SharePoint site have the appropriate permissions to initiate the group connection process from the upper-right gear icon menu. Global admins can use PowerShell cmdlet or API tools as well.

Q: What if my site has items with unique permissions? Do they change?

A: The group connection process does not change permissions on items with unique permissions.

Q: Can I limit the availability of this feature to just my global admins?

A: Yes, there is an admin setting that lets you control whether this feature is available for site administrators from the gear menu.

Additional resources

Support page for connecting classic SharePoint team sites to Office 365 Groups
Administrator documentation, which includes instructions on changing the user interface availability for this feature
SharePoint modernization scanner tool to prepare your classic team sites for modernization
PowerShell cmdlet documentation for Set-SPOSiteOffice365Group
API documentation:

Previously disclosed at Ignite 2017: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Work-better-together-with-SharePoint-team-sites-Office-365-app/ba-p/109550
Ignite 2017 session on-demand, “No team site left behind!”

Updated Jun 07, 2018

Version 2.0

Product Updates

Mark-Kashman

Microsoft

Joined June 24, 2016

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33 Comments

VeroniquePalmer
Brass Contributor
Aug 29, 2019
It is not acceptable that Microsoft get to make a call on who we add where in our companies. Vote this up on uservoice.

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/37158241-manually-set-permissions-for-everyone-except-exte
Brad Hayes
Brass Contributor
Apr 08, 2019
Hi,
I know a lot of customers who have O365 Groups and heavily use the sharepoint site and are not using MS Teams, they want to control access to the MS planner / mailbox (hence a private a O365 group) but they would like to give the organisation read access in general to the whole sharepoint site. What used to be a simple case of adding "everyone but external" in the visitor group now is no longer the case and MS have a batch job that removes it!? Ive tested this and yes its removed as per the KB article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4492201/everyone-except-external-users-group-is-removed
Q1. Id like to know the rationale behind this decision? Why was it done?
Q2. It would have been better if this was configurable at tenant or even better at the Group setting i.e. do you want to allow the everyone except external in the SP visitor group for the private O365 Group (or something a bit shorter and succinct!)
I now have to either create a new security group that mimics the "everyone but external" in Azure AD, or create a new SP visitor group with visitor permissions and hope the MS batch job doesn't scan my custom group, and then do this for every new / existing O365 Group Sharepoint site... It is hard enough to keep up with all the changes and explain these things to simply to clients and now even i struggle to explain this decision
Bruno Aleixo
Microsoft
Mar 13, 2019
Rachel_Davis UserVoice is the best channel to use.
Rachel_Davis
Steel Contributor
Mar 12, 2019
Also, doesn't this defeat the purpose of the modern Site Permissions option? The whole point was for users to be able to see who a site is shared with to allow them to make good choices about what to post there. Now I have a site that APPEARS to be limited to the members, but in reality is open to everyone. How is this a good thing?
Rachel_Davis
Steel Contributor
Mar 12, 2019
Bruno Aleixothanks for the update, but that doesn't actually provide much of an answer. Is there any explanation as to purpose behind this? What is the justification/rationale? Why would Microsoft care if we add everyone to a visitor group? And why does it work within Microsoft but not for the rest of us? Because this is the precise scenario used for the Intrazone podcast site - It's a private group-connected SharePoint team site that is open to all of Microsoft. Read the comments, when I asked Mark-Kashman about it, his answer was to Invite people > "Share site only" with "everyone except external" as this will add them to the member group.

Is it worth bothering to put something on SharePoint User Voice?
Bruno Aleixo
Microsoft
Mar 12, 2019
The kb is now public .

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4492201/everyone-except-external-users-group-is-removed
Kristi Robison
Brass Contributor
Mar 11, 2019
Mark-Kashman Please update this and all other related Modernization stubs with a notice at the introduction stating that root level sites currently are not able to be modernized. Currently the only way for an admin to come to this determination is to read through and attempt all of the site modernization efforts and fail, by being guided to:
Connect to O365 through site settings failure (link),
Scripting Set-SPOSiteOffice365Group and failing (link),
Surrendering to the Modernization Scanner, which first requires:
Configuring an Azure/SP App client and ID, then running the scanner,
ONLY THEN to receive the O365 Group Connection Readiness.xlsx file, filtering to your root site, and seeing the */isTenantRootSite and the message that "the root site of your tenant can not be group connected".
This really needs to be much more prominent at the start of all the Modernization documentation - it currently isn't captured anywhere.

On that line, is there an ETA for a conversion option of existing Classic Tenant Root sites to Modern?
Thank you!
KevinCrossman
MVP
Feb 26, 2019
Bruno Aleixo Add me to the list of people who don't understand the rationale, and feel strongly that if this is a design decision it has been implemented very poorly.

If you don't want people to add "everyone" to the Site Visitors group in a Private Group site, then DON'T LET THEM ADD EVERYONE. Allowing people to add that via the UI and then to pull the rug out a couple days later is a terrible user experience.
Rachel_Davis
Steel Contributor
Feb 15, 2019
SergeiBaklanthat is exactly my scenario. We have a modern O365 group enabled site as our new O365 Collaboration Home. We use the O365 group to manage meetings, notes, communications, etc. for the User Group, but the site itself needs to be open to the entire organization as this is where we post governance, how to articles, tidbits and links to updates like this one. I announced it to the User Group last Tuesday and was getting ready to put it out on Yammer when I started getting access requests from visitors and discovered that "everyone except external" disappeared. Twice. I've spent 2 mos. building this site and can't publish it if it's going to randomly kick people out.

So if Bruno Aleixo is going to have a KB article on this, does that mean this is intended/expected behavior and that Microsoft is not going to fix it? Is Microsoft expecting us to choose between public access in communication sites and group collaboration in team sites?

Bruno, can you give us a hint please on what this KB article is going to say?
Paul Le Sueur
Copper Contributor
Feb 15, 2019
Thanks SergeiBaklan and Bruno Aleixo

Will look forward to the KB article.

I think this "feature" falls somewhere between something that should be documented (as it is intentional, but strange), or something that should be fixed (as it is broken). On that basis, it's difficult to know which forum to approach... That is where Techcommunity comes in I guess!

Thanks,

Paul.