What is Office 365 Groups? And Why is Everyone Curious About It?

Many organizations today are moving to Office 365 from Office 2010, and some are even using a mixed environment with various Office versions. Organizations are taking a leap towards Office 365 providing their users flexibility and an opportunity to work more efficiently.

This move has raised a common question from organizations— what are the benefits of Office 365 Groups? These questions are coming from organizations who are new to Office 365 or are just uncertain of how Groups can benefit them.

Let us start with the official definition of Office 365 Groups by Microsoft.

Groups in Office 365 allows you to choose a set of people that you want to work together with and then set up a collection of resources for them to share. Groups does not require manual permissions for these resources, just adding members to a group automatically gives them the required permissions to use the tools the group provides.

 Office 365 Group has two features that differentiate it from other Microsoft technologies.

•         The end user can set up various resources without involving the IT department
•         Office 365 Group has a dynamic nature that allows it to collaborate with other Microsoft technologies

Businesses today are increasing cross-functional collaboration with external organizations than the traditional organizational hierarchies. Earlier these technologies were provided and managed by the IT department, causing a heavy workload for the IT helpdesk and support.

It created regulatory and compliance risks for sensitive corporate data. The IT team was involved in collaborating teams. However, IT team could not keep a track of change of roles and association with different organizations.

With Office 365 Groups, users are authorized to use all the tools that are required to work as a group. Office 365 Groups enables self-service, dynamic collaboration that has streamlined the traditional methods of organizations.

In an Office 365 Group, a collection of users work together internally and externally in an organization, with transparency and use of right tools. Group gathers the information of users in that group and creates a ‘group identity’ in Azure Active Directory for the following:

•          Outlook: Mailbox and calendar that is shared
•          SharePoint Online: It is a documentation library
•          Planner: Managing the tasks
•          OneNote: For taking notes
•          Microsoft Teams: Chat-based

Earlier, the IT department had to grant permissions for all of these separately, which took a lot of their time to configure each tool. Office 365 Groups now combine these repetitive tasks into one task. Thus, benefiting the IT department as it allows them to gather identities into Groups in Azure Active Directory, simplifying the permission management.

While creating a group you will have to decide if you want the group to be a private group or a public group. The public group content can be accessed by anybody in the organization, and anybody in the organization can join this group. In a private group, the content can be accessed only by the members of the group and a member can join the group only after the group owner approves it.

Public groups and private groups cannot be accessed by members outside the organization unless they are invited as guests.

With Office 365 Groups you can easily spin something on the cloud and get tasks done from the team than deal with the IT team and not get things done on time. By providing Groups in your organization, you provide choice to your teams, projects, and business to use whatever technology best fits their needs.