Announcing Office 365 Groups + Team Sites integration!
Today, we announced the integration of Office 365 Groups and Team Sites. When you create an Office 365 Group, you get a shared inbox, calendar, OneNote notebook, a Planner for task management—and now, a full-powered SharePoint team site. The integration of O365 Groups and SharePoint team sites means that any time a new team site is created, a new group membership will be created as well. You can easily see the members of the site, if the site is listed as public or private within your organization and how it has been classified. In addition, all existing Office 365 Groups will be updated with their own team site. And once the rollout is complete for your tenant, all newly created groups will get a team site by default. Get the complete details in this post and learn more during the O365 Groups sessions at Ignite. Mark-Kashman cfiessingerIntroducing Outlook Groups on iPad
It's been a year since we launched Outlook Groups mobile apps on iOS, Android and Windows phones. The reception thus far on our mobile apps has been extremely positive, and we have made huge improvements across the board with added functionality, as well as improving speed and reliability of our mobile apps with a goal of producing the best groups experience on the go. Ever since we launched the iPhone app, we’ve seen people using it in all sorts of scenarios, many of them on an iPad! We have heard from teachers in classroom who use iPad as their primary classroom device for the need to have Outlook Groups on the iPad so they can share updates and assignments with their class. We have heard from our enterprise users alike about sales teams who use iPad to share conversations, files and events. Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of Outlook Groups for the iPad. Office 365 work or school users worldwide can now download the app from the iPad store. Download the app to your iPad today and go here http://aka.ms/o365g to learn more about Office 365 Groups! All the functionality that exists for Outlook Groups on the iPhone is now also available on the iPad. It’s easier than ever to participate in group conversations, share pictures, or view and edit your documents in full screen, and view and create group events to bring your team together on the iPad. Give it a try and send us feedback. Kady DundasUpdate: Auto creation of Direct Reports group in Outlook (MC96611)
Following the publication of this message center post: Auto creation of Direct Reports group in Outlook on March 16 (MC96611), we've seen a few questions and concerns from customers about this upcoming feature slated to roll out on April 13 th , and wanted to provide an update to our community. The goal of this feature is to help managers collaborate more effectively with their team, using groups in Outlook (see this article for more info). We understand your concerns and have decided to limit the rollout of this feature to a small set of customers (notified via MC94808) whom we will work with directly to ensure both feedback is considered, and that feature usage has a positive impact. We thank you all for your constructive feedback, and look forward to continued Group innovations in the future.Invite who you want in group calendars
Good news! We've heard your feedback here on Tech Community as well as UserVoice that you really just want to: Put something on a shared group calendar Pick whomever you want to invite, which may not be the group itself. Over the next few days, you will have more options when managing your group calendar: Just invite anyone you want. If you want to invite the entire group, simply add the group to the attendees list. This change gives a lot more flexibility to the group calendar surface: Invite no one: this is good for putting milestones on the calendar as a visual reminder that it's coming up. If you want to add a copy of it to your own personal calendar, you can "Add to my calendar". This is also great for a vacation calendar, where you can create a ? vacation ? event on the group calendar. "Brownbag-style events": A lunchtime learning session is typically not mandatory for attendees, but is required for the organizer and the presenter. Now, you can create an event on the group calendar and add specific individuals without adding the group itself to the attendees list. This way, those individuals will get an invite from the group, and group members can freely add the event to their calendars. This is also good if you want your vacation time on the group calendar, as well as your manager's calendar. Invite the group and anyone else: For group meetings where you'd like everyone in the group to attend and edit, this is best. This is particularly handy for recurring meetings that take place over the course of many months where the a single organizer may not be around for its entire desired lifetime (i.e., if someone goes on vacation or leaves the team). Across Outlook, not much is changing: In Outlook for Windows, removing the group from a group meeting will now, in fact, actually not sent the group an invitation. In the new Outlook on the web, we've updated the tooltips to match the functionality. In the classic Outlook on the web, we won't be supporting this update. In Outlook for iOS and Android, group calendaring is coming soon. 😉 Try it out, and let us know what you think! Cheers, Ethan[New!] Drag and drop conversations into groups
Good news! We're currently rolling out drag and drop for messages and conversations into groups in Outlook on the web first for First Release customers, then Standard release customers. It's much easier to explain with a GIF: Support for Outlook 2016 for Windows is coming soon--stay tuned. You can find the documentation here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/24e809db-70e1-45b7-8d54-efac7951dc95Experiences "migrating" to an O365 Group
So, I am starting to "migrate" the particular team that I work for over to Groups (that means from our existing SharePoint site, existing Yammer group, existing mailboxes, etc). Wanted to share the general experience and reception so far, with PLUS / MINUS perception notes: PLUS - We are looking to use Group Conversations and shut down use of Yammer for our team discussions. So far users seem more apt to use the conversations because it is more like email, so probably a ding for use of Yammer In general we are going to guide Groups users away from using Yammer PLUS - We are using an automatic group membership (everyone that reports to my Manager) - which works perfectly! We have a revolving door of interns/temps as part of the team, and access to resources is no-brainer. MINUS - This will be our first Modern SharePoint site, and big negative is critical links removed from the UI. Menu - using "/_layouts/15/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx" to recreate our horizontal navigation. This accomplishes what we need, but I fear that it may eventually go away... Permissions - I understand group permission limitations, but our connected SP sites have to have additional viewers and contributors. Right now from the UI, can only apply permissions to Group Owners and Group Members. Using "/_layouts/15/user.aspx" to get around this for now, but again will future updates restrict this? MINUS - Document Migration - we have our own PowerShell scripts that we use to migrate content between sites. The scripts appear to only work run by a Group owner if the person running the script is a Group owner. We typically use a service account and set it as Site Collection Admin, run the move, then remove the service account. Here the service account still doenst have rights even after being made the SCA for a Group. We will definitely be doing most of this for our users since we don't want to put the tedious actions on them MINUS - Calendar - we use a SharePoint Team Site calendar - was able to easily open the SP Calendar in Outlook "Agenda View", copy entries, and paste them into the Group Calendar (in Outlook Agenda View), but they never synced back up, never appeared in the Group calendar, though I see them in my physical Outlook calendar Dont seem to be able to create just an entry (without actually inviting all attendees) MINUS - Group Navigation - switching between the different Groups workloads is still pitiful I've manually entered direct links to the different workloads in the Groups SharePoint Site, but users continually get "lost". They'll end up on the calendar which has no links whatsover (sometimes), the options are in different places in each workload. I know this has been brought up over and over, but its been months and months, if not over a year at this point, and doesnt seem this is getting any better at all. MINUS - Groups files - this is maybe just our opinion, but do not like the Groups Files automatically including email attachments in the default view. Often confusing, especially if things have been moved to the SharePoint files, you see duplicates, etc. PLUS - Groups app - easy access to everything, general consensus is much easier to find stuff from the app then from the web itself MINUS - Groups app notifications - marking conversation messages as read seems to be wonky, users are complaining because they have to physically leave the group a couple times before it tells them they have read all the messages. MINUS - Planner - Though there is excitement about what Planner can be, some negatives emerging - no Planner app, unsure of a way right now to move items from a SharePoint Action Items list to Planner (other than just manually reentering stuff). PLUS - OneNote, this has always been my favorite thing Microsoft has built, so glad to see it easier integrated into our group activities. We are migrating our running Staff Meeting Agenda (from Yammer note) to OneNote MINUS - UI - we have always used a custom enterprise mega menu throughout our SharePoint environment, for easy navigation, with no customization options, we lose this and will have to start teach our users to keep going to our Intranet homepage, then navigate where you want to go with the menu NEUTRAL - Dont care for the single column of the websites, we have traditionally used a custom responsive layout that has at least 2 columns of content. Everything just feels to big / too much whitespace. MINUS - SharePoint App, we have multiple document libraries, the Groups/SharePoint apps really only focus on the primay Shared Documents one. Overall, it seems like it will be a positive adoption, but there are several things that just miss the mark, at least for how our organization works.
Guest access is released 100% WW in service
As announced on 09/08 Guest Access is now 100% WW. Guest access let users collaborate with external users outside their organization in Office 365 Groups. We released first release to FR customers on 09/08, 5% WW on 10/10 & 10% WW on 10/24. The response and reception of Guest access has been good & encouraging. Here is the link to End user documentation: https://support.office.com/article/Guest-access-in-Office-365-Groups-bfc7a840-868f-4fd6-a390-f347bf51aff6 Here is the link to Admin help documentation: https://support.office.com/article/Guest-access-to-Office-365-groups-Admin-Help-7c713d74-a144-4eab-92e7-d50df526ff96 Here is the link to Quick help FAQs for tenant admin: https://support.office.com/article/Quick-help-Guest-access-in-Office-365-group-0b8d98ad-7bce-4080-a22e-ef1fea1a348c Last but not the least, big thanks to the folks that made this feature possible! Feel free to reach-out for any question and query!Our Groups Rollout (part 2)
So we have really started rolling Groups out, gave some feedback when we first started evaluating/piloting (here) and now i've got some more feedback to share based on direct business user and real life scenarios. We are marketing this as "collaboration in a box" -- thats what makes the most sense to business end-users. We are not even considering Teams at this point in time, and since everything is a Group anyways, we want to get a firm grasp, foundation with Groups first before evaluation the things that sit on top of it. Our setup Groups creation is locked down to IT We are focusing of formal business workgroups and teams that already exist, and organizational/project teams based on special request We have a request process that goes through IT We are manually creating all groups with this format: Name: GROUP - Group Name Email: group_acryonym@company.com We also did group categories: Workgroup, Sub-Team, Team, Project, Organization, Group, Sales Subscribe users automatically (by default) Planner notifications turned on (by default) I started out trying to handle migrations myself (just powershell scripts and so on), but in the end it got too difficult and unwieldy and we decided to invest in a migration tool - ShareGate - which is making everything a breeze. I wrote up my own user guide that shows what each "tool" as part of Groups is and some basics for accomplishing every day tasks, and a new group day 1 guide (showing them how to favorite it in outlook, follow the sp site, add it to S4B, sync files/onenote, etc) We created a web part that shows which Groups a member is part of and links to each group tool (here), and we've been using that are our defacto "front door" to groups, training them you can get there from a million different entry points, but when in doubt, go to our intranet homepage and get what you are looking for The good: Our business users love the mobile access to the data, and how they can access it from Outlook, web, or mobile app How everything is interconnected - they are grasping this and its value so much easier than just getting a SharePoint site, and not always knowing what to do with it We are actually advertising how you don't even have to use the site, most groups are collaborating with just the surfaced workloads, whether they know it is sharepoint or not Our business users are really liking the exposure some of the existing tools that they didnt necessarily know about (like OneNote) Planner - they love planner, we have traditionally use SharePoint task lists, its simple and make sense, and they understand some of the coming features that will address their near team wants Overwhelmingly they are viewing this as a "fix" to the negative perceptions of SharePoint collaboration in general (a nice somewhat unexpected reaction) The bad: Notification hell - This is the biggie. We have started with the firehose wide open approach, and will probably be changing that immediately. The regular conversations is one thing, but the Planner notifications is just WAY too much. (between the emails, the app push notifications, the notifications pop up in O365 interface, and so on). We had a major workgroup just complete, so they went in to start loading in action items, and I wish I had told the facilitator to turn off notifications before doing it, but everyone just got bombarded by like 100 emails I think this has to start taking priority - i think it is the last remaining impediment to really gaining user adoption IMO - they are loving the features, but this is a big turn off I worry if they start to unsubscribe and turn off all the notifications, then they'll stop "going" to the Groups, and start backsliding into old ways of doing things. "Modern" Sub-sites - We are migrating existing content to the Group sharepoint site on their behalf (leveraging ShareGate), but subsites are just "wonky" in a Group site at this point -- I don't know a better way to describe it at this point - its like everything is built for just the top level site, and subsites are an afterthought at this point SP News - ya, its a shiny toy in the sharepoint sites, but most of our users so far have been like, "meh..." Calendar invites - maybe not a big deal, but it just adds to the notification hell, need better ways to create events without inviting/notifying everyone (here) Files Tab - lots of confused users trying to upload files to the "Files" tab and not knowing how to get it in the right folder that they use to analyze their data. We are marketing this as one view is for "recent activity" (and "please dont upload anything here") and one view is for uploading. I'm finding this takes direct explanation to the business users, otherwise they are not really grasping where all of their folders went. I've not been a big fan of this feature, but I do get it (here)
