O365 – Office 365 Groups – Introduction Part 1

Hi All,

In this article we will discuss basics of Office 365 Groups. We will continue this series to discuss advance topics on Office 365 Group, PowerShell scripts, CSOM code and so on.

What is Office 365 Group?

Microsoft defines “Office 365 Groups” as

Groups in Office 365 let you choose a set of people that you wish to collaborate with and easily set up a collection of resources for those people to share. Resources such as a shared Outlook inbox, shared calendar or a document library for collaborating on files.

1. In SharePoint, we have groups, in those we add the members and assigns the permissions. When we create security groups for SharePoint those are stored in Active Directory.
2. Similarly, Office 365 Group is nothing but an object in Azure Active Directory having list of users as members / owners of the Group. These members then can share associated resources such as Outlook Inbox, Shared Calendar,
3. Office 365 Groups are stored in Office 365 Tenant Azure Active Directory (AAD).
4. When we create Microsoft Teams in Office 365, New plan in Planner, New Workspace in Power BI, etc. behind the scene Office 365 group is created behind the scene.
5. We no longer need to worry about the permissions separately, when we add members to Group, permissions are automatically assigned to respective services (SharePoint Online, Yammer, OneNote etc.)
6. Each Group can have up to 10 Owners
7. Each Group can have 1000 + members
8. When we remove member from the O365 Group using Admin Portal, respective member will no longer have access to SharePoint Online if Teams associated with given Group, Yammer Group, Shared OneNote etc.
9. There are two types of Groups Private and Public.
10. Office 365 Plans for Group:
    • Any Office 365 subscription has Exchange Online and SharePoint Online (Business Essentials, Business Premium Plans and the Enterprise E1, E2 and E3 plans) will support Groups
    • If we have Exchange-only plan, then we will get Shared inbox and Shared calendar
    • If we have yammer only plan, then we will have the conversation feed in the Yammer group

Groups in Office 365 Admin Portal:

From UI, Administrator can manage Office 365 Groups from Admin portal. Administrator can view all Groups, add new groups, Delete Group, change group icon, Add / Remove group members, Group details like Name and Description.

Managing the Office 365 Groups from Office 365 Admin Center:

1. Login to the Office 365 admin center https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/groups
2. From the left side menu, select Groups, as shown in following figure 1.
   

   Figure 1 – Office 365 – Groups

3. We will be redirected to groups home page as shown in figure 2- https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/groups
   

   Figure 2 – Office 365 – Admin Center – Groups home page

4. We can manage / view details of individual group by selecting given any group as shown in below figure 3 –
   

   Figure 3 – Office 365 – Group details

   I’ll stop here, in next article we will discuss how to manage Office 365 groups or Office 365 group operations.

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