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

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 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 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 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:

  * 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 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 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