As a potential successor to the popular SharePoint Team Sites, Office 365 Groups is the root of Microsoft’s more recent aim to bring “experiences” to the Office 365 platform – instead of just focusing on individual technologies. Given the amount of different functionality already available within Office 365 – from word processing to business intelligence to project management – further connectivity between tools would offer users an even greater working environment than at present. And yet, Office 365 Groups has so far flown somewhat under the radar for many users.
“Working together is success”
You may be wondering the reasoning behind the introduction of Groups, given the popularity and capability of SharePoint Team Sites (and even things like Yammer Groups, which we will look at later). However, in the words of Henry Ford, “keeping together is progress; working together is success”, and therein lies Microsoft’s reasoning behind Office 365 Groups. Office 365, as Microsoft’s ‘home in the cloud’, is a platform that’s constantly improving, and the enterprise tech giant found that despite acting as a repository for all your work-based tools, the tools themselves were somewhat detached from each other.
You can get a sense of this from the tiles in the Office 365 ‘My Apps’ screen – it’s all there for you: your email, calendar, notes, files and more. But it’s not really connected. You can move from one to the other extremely quickly, but you’ll still be flitting in and out of processes. Like the straight edges of the tiles themselves; while in close proximity of one another, there’s nothing really bringing them together. For example, Outlook and OneDrive are great for storing all your conversations and files, but what about conversations about files? Groups looks to change that; the apps become more like the pieces of a jigsaw, interlocking to give teams a more cohesive and complete Office 365 experience.
Office 365 Groups: Searching for better connection
At their core, Office 365 Groups can be broken down into the following features
- Conversations (Email)
- Calendar
- Files (OneDrive)
- Notebook (OneNote)
- Microsoft Planner and Delve are also set to be integrated at a later date (depending on your Office 365 release track you may see these sooner rather than later)
From within Outlook, you can create a new Group, which in turn creates a shared inbox, calendar, file repository and notebook to converse and collaborate in. Meanwhile, creating a new Group creates an object in Azure Active Directory, meaning policies and permissions can be applied for the whole Group.
Those already familiar with the Office 365 platform will understand the likes of Calendar, OneDrive and OneNote, and the primary functionalities of each will be present in created Groups, with a few extra features added in.
Conversations
Calendar
Notebook
Files
Sound familiar?
Those of you who have previously used Yammer Groups may be experiencing a slight feeling of déjà vu, and with fair reason. Office 365 Groups took a lot of inspiration from Yammer Groups, but there are still a few noticeable differences. While Yammer’s attention is more towards the social enterprise experience, Office 365 Groups allow you to choose the vehicle for your conversations. Per the needs of your team, you can decide on the ideal conversation experience and decide which interface to work with.
If your teams are comfortable working within Outlook and are content with the functionality we discussed above, then ‘Groups in Outlook’ will provide you with all the collaboration efforts you require. The other option, ‘Groups for Yammer’, offers both public and private conversations, using online chat and a commenting system more akin to social media sites such as Facebook. SharePoint files are accessible from the Yammer interface and the shared calendar is powered through Exchange for more calendar overlays, along with some other differences. This article from Microsoft MVP and Yammer pro Naomi Moneypenny goes into some more detail on the experiences you can expect from both Office 365 Groups and Yammer Groups.
Adding Yammer to the list of integrated tools, Office 365 Groups has made a considerable impact on how users can continue their improved productivity efforts when part of a dedicated team – whether it’s composing emails, writing documents or scheduling meetings.
