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What is an Office 365 Group and How to Create One on Your Own

Posted by Errin O'Connor on Apr, 24, 2019 02:04

What is an Office 365 Group and How to Create One on Your Own

Whether you’re new to Office 365 or you’re not quite certain of how to use Groups or their related benefits, you’re not alone. This question has been asked by a lot of stakeholders within companies who are either migrating their on-premise environment to Office 365 or settings up a new Office 365 tenant altogether.

What is an Office 365 Group?

Office 365 Groups is the cross-application membership service in Office 365. At the basic level, an Office 365 Group is an object in Azure Active Directory with a list of members and a loose coupling to related workloads including a SharePoint team site, Yammer Group, shared Exchange mailbox resources, Planner, Power BI and OneNote.

You can add or remove people to the group just as you would any other group-based security object in Active Directory. An Office 365 administrator can define an Office 365 Group, add members, and benefit from features such as an Exchange shared mailbox, SharePoint document library, Yammer Group, and so on.”

But, does this actually affect your organization? – Think of it like this – Office 365 lets you and your friends, coworkers, or collaborators hang out in a group that receives emails, collaborates on documents, or access materials and sites.

You may be thinking that you already have this in Active Directory? Perhaps, but not entirely. Confused yet? With an Office 365 Group, there’s no need for IT to get involved and the nature of how these work with collaborating in other Office 365 Applications is dynamic.

Users can grab whatever tools necessary to work as a group. Owners can add and remove users as needed and users are able to share files, sites, and emails with each other.

Applications make it much easier and more efficient to collaborate with your coworkers. The integration of Planner, Teams, and SharePoint is changing the future of how we collaborate.

Creating an Office 365 Group

There are over a dozen different ways to create an Office 365 Group. Outlook (both Online and Desktop), SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, Teams, Power BI, Stream, Yammer, Hub Site, Office 365 Admin Center, Azure AD, Dynamics, and Microsoft Flow.

Each of these is interactive with one another and Groups carry across throughout all of them. A centralized membership for more than one product in one place. These can carry over permissions as well as members.

So, whether you’re new to this or starting to reorganize your environment, Office 365 Groups are an easy way to share content and collaborate across all of Office 365.

Errin O'Connor
About the Author

Errin O'Connor

With over 25 years of experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting, Errin O’Connor has led hundreds of large-scale enterprise implementations from Business Intelligence, Power BI, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, IT Security, Azure and Hybrid Cloud efforts for over 165 Fortune 500 companies.

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