blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

October 31, 2016

Office 365 groups now have real SharePoint site

Filed under: Office365,SharePoint — Tags: — frederique @ 23:55

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

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 has a full blow Modern Team Site, with a site home page.

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
Site settings in a site associated with  Group versus the settings of a native SharePoint site

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…

September 30, 2016

External access to Office 365 Groups

Filed under: Office365 — Tags: — frederique @ 19:31

This is what I have been waiting for: External access to Groups. I can now invite people from outside our organization to join me in Office 365 Groups. This is great, because I do not only collaborate with my colleagues, but also with my clients.

Recently, I started to work on a small project with my client. We used Skype for Business to talk and show each other what we were working on, and that was just fine. But then they wanted to give me some input documents. And I wanted to share some drafts with them. We did not have a shared team site, so these documents were sent back and forth by e-mail as classic attachments. Really annoying, because:

  • it was hard to get an overview of what we had shared,
  • a new version had to be sent again, which clutters our inboxes
  • and are we sure we have the latest version before us?

I was on the brink of requesting an official project site, when external access to Office 365 Groups was announced. It was not available immediately in our tenant, but after a few days of increasingly eager attempts, it suddenly was there! The option to invite people from outside our organisations.

As an Owner of an Office 365 Group, I can now invite people by entering their mail address.

Add a guest to the Office 365 Group. The Group does warn you that this is an external user: a guest.

Add a guest to the Office 365 Group. The Group does warn you that this is an external user: a guest.

The guest (in this case, Garth) then gets an invitation e-mail, from which he can start an e-mail conversation and open the shared files.

Invitation to join a Group as a guest.

Invitation to join a Group as a guest.

And to open the shared files, his e-mail address does have to be connected to a Microsoft account. If it isn’t, the recipient of the invitation is prompted to create a Microsoft account and connect it to this mail address. My guests (now Garth,  in real life my clients) fortunately have a Microsoft account associated to their mail address. But they do have to sign in.

The guest needs to sign in to get the files shared in the Group.

The guest needs to sign in to get the files shared in the Group.

 

What the guest can do in the Group is limited:

  • He cannot view the Conversations in the context of the Group. Only in Outlook.
  • He cannot see the Calendar in the Group.
  • He cannot use the Planner.
  • He does not see the “external group” listed with the groups of his own organization.
    So he needs to keep the e-mail with the link at hand or bookmark the external group in his browser.
  • He does not get the full list of all members and cannot see the details of the people.
    This is undoubtedly a security / privacy feature: it is none of Garth’s business who we report to and what else we do.

    People details visible for colleagues

    People details visible for colleagues

    People details hidden from guests.

    People details hidden from guests.

But for my purpose, it was sufficient, because the guest can collaborate on documents and notes:

  • He can read, edit and upload documents.
  • He can use the OneNote notebook.
Sharing files with guests.

Sharing files with guests.

 

So I am definitely a happy camper, or rather: a happy collaborator.  I was able to share files and share notes with my clients in a quick & easy way, and that is exactly what we wanted…

April 30, 2016

Office 365 Groups – They make serious progress

Filed under: Office365 — Tags: — frederique @ 20:32

Six months ago, I looked at Office 365 groups in my discussion of the collaboration tools of Office 365 and what to use when. At that time, I was disappointed with the Groups. Since then, Groups have improved a lot. They still leave a lot to be desired. But I am optimistic, because of the speedy progress that Microsoft has made. So what do I think is new & hot since my previous blog post?

Configuration of the library in Files

For me, the biggest improvement at this time is in Files. Maybe I am too much of a SharePoint addict or a control freak, but I love the fact that the Library Settings are back in the Files section. For some reason it used to be impossible to change or even see the library settings. Maybe to make sure the Group Owner does not have to do any advanced SharePoint stuff? Well, you don’t have to change the library settings, but at least now you are able to do so, if you want. For example, now you can add helpful views based on your own metadata. And you can invite Visitors to read your files.

Office 365 Group: Manage views in the Document Library of the Files section.

Office 365 Group: Manage views in the Document Library of the Files section.

Note that the interface for the Document Library is the new one, which has also appeared in OneDrive for Business and for which you can switch on a preview in SharePoint Team Sites (at least, if you are on an early bird tenant). In that new interface we’ve lost the good old ribbon with the Library tab; you’ll find the Library Settings under the gear icon. I still have some doubts about the usability of this new interface, but that may also be a work in progress.

Also, I am happy that the Files section of the Group no longer advertises itself als OneDrive: in the suite bar you now see the label Sites. That makes sense, because the address bar indicates that we are in sites as well. The OneDrive label was just confusing.

Tasks

Another big improvement is not full available yet: the addition of a tool to manage your team’s tasks. The new Office 365 Planner is available in preview. For each group, there is a Plan in that Planner, which allows you to assign tasks, track their status and organize them into buckets. You can reach the rest of the Group from there. Unfortunately, you cannot access the plan from the rest of the Group yet. When that becomes available for all Group users, we’ll have a way to manage our tasks processes and be able to do basic project management in our Office 365 Group.

Office 365 Planner: a plan in the context of its group.

Office 365 Planner: a plan in the context of its group.

Integration in Office 2016

I’ve received Outlook 2016 since my previous post. Outlook devotees, who prefer to do everything with Outlook, should have that version, because it works seamlessly with the Office 365 Groups. In Outlook 2016, you not only see the Outlook-parts of the Group (the Conversation and the Calendar), but you also have access to the Files, Notebook, option to create new Groups etc via the ribbon.

Office 365 Groups have a strong presence in Outlook 2015, where all Group options are available via the ribbon. Files and Notebook will open in the browser.

Office 365 Groups have a strong presence in Outlook 2015, where all Group options are available via the ribbon. Files and Notebook will open in the browser.

According to the Office 365 Roadmap, Microsoft is continuing to work hard on Office 365 Groups. For example, the roadmap says they are rolling out the ability to update the privacy type. That’s a relief, because I’ve seen users regret their choice for private or public, and seen groups evolve from private to should-be-public. Soon we will be able to change that setting. And Microsoft is developing functionality that allows for more serious governance, like policies, expiry for groups, the option to delete groups that were accidentally deleted.

So the Office 365 have improved a lot since they were launched as a rather Minimum Viable Product, and they are evolving into a Useful Product. And if Microsoft keeps up the good work, they may yet grow to be a Great Product.

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