An Office 365 Group or a SharePoint Team Site? Now we mostly get an Office 365 AND a SharePoint Team Site: the integration between Groups and SharePoint gives us a full SharePoint Site when we create Group. At a later stage, we will also get a Group when we create a site from SharePoint.
When I talked about Office 365 Groups a year ago, I was not particularly pleased with them. They had potential, but also a lot of drawbacks. But these Groups are really getting somewhere now. Earlier this year I felt that these Groups were making serious progress. Then I enthused about external access. Now the integration with SharePoint sites is starting to make me a happy Groupie…
A SharePoint site for my Groups…
It took a while for the integration between Groups and SharePoint arrived at my Dutch first release tenants, but now all of my Office 365 Groups have a SharePoint site associated to it. Not just newly created Groups, also existing Groups.
When I am in the Conversations section of the Group, I even see an explicit link to the Site.
Link to the SharePoint site from the Conversations section of the Group
Clicking on that link opens the homepage of the SharePoint site associated to this Group. On the left hand side, we get the Quick Launch menu which we recognize from SharePoint.
The homepage is less recognizable, because it is the homepage of a Modern Team site, which looks quite different from an old-fashioned Team Site. This is actually the first Modern Team Site that I can play with, but that is a different story.
My Group now has a full blow Modern Team Site, with a site home page.
I am very happy that I have a SharePoint site with my Group, because now I can:
- Add lists for anything from the who-brings-what for the team barbecue to inventories of special solutions with their owners and statuses.
- Use a page where I can bring information together. Not just the home page; I can create new pages if I want
… But I do not see a full SharePoint site
When I dug a little deeper in the site settng of my new “Group Site”, I saw that some options are missing:
- Users and Permissions, with the site permissions
- Look & feel: Title, description and logo, plus the Top Link Bar
- Site actions: Save the site as template, and Delete this site
- Most of the Web Designer Galleries
- Site administration: Site closure and deletion, popularity trends
- Site collection administration: Enterprise Content Management tools like audit log reports, content type policy templates and site policies,. Also popularity and search reports. And the sharepoint designer settings
The settings of a native SharePoint site versus the settings in a site associated with Group versus
So did these settings drop out of the site? No. According to Mark Kashman in the Q&A of his keynote at the Collab365 Global Conference, nothing has been taken out of the sites. However, some things have been hidden…
The options that are hidden in a site associated with a Group are the options that you are supposed to manage in the Group (in Outlook) instead of in the site, like its membership. You are also not supposed the delete the site but the Group as a whole. And he said that they had hidden the options that would confuse non-SharePoint experts, so that may be why we don’t get the policy stuff.
So
When I need full blown Enterprise Content Management functionality in a site, with Audit log reports and policies, I still create a native SharePoint site. But for “normal” collaboration, Office 365 are becoming the go-to option…
