What are Office 365 Groups?
Microsoft Office 365 Groups lets you to collaborate with your teammates when writing documents, creating spreadsheets, working on project plans, scheduling meetings and sending email. Office 365 release 2019 is a new service available to 365 and 2019 Outlook users.
Groups lets you choose a set of people that you wish to collaborate with and also set up a collection of resources for them to share. For example; a shared Outlook inbox, a shared calendar or a document library for collaborating on files.
You don’t have to manually assign permissions to all these resources because you automatically give the required permissions when you add members to the group. Any member of the group can use the tools that your group provides. Groups are the new and improved method for what we used to do using distribution lists or shared mailboxes.
Office 365 Groups can be created from:
- Outlook on the web
- Outlook Mobile
- SharePoint
- Planner
- Teams
Which tool you choose to start from depends on what kind of group you’re working with. For example, most will tend to start from Outlook when creating a Group organised around email and calendar. If the Group is for company wide communication you would tend to start with Yammer. For chat-based collaboration start your Group from Microsoft Teams.
Creating Groups
When creating a group where you can collaborate with your teammates you need to decide if you want it to be a private group or a public group. Content in a public group can be seen by anybody in your organisation and anybody in your organisation is able to join the group. Whereas content in a private group can only be seen by the members of the group and people who want to join a private group have to be approved by a group owner.
Neither public groups nor private groups can be seen or accessed by people outside of your organisation unless those people have been specifically invited as guests.
Adding guests to Office 365 Groups