This past week, I was presenting the ‘Modern Office’ and the collection of Office 365 applications from Microsoft to a CIO and his senior team commented on the challenge of introducing so many applications, especially Yammer, Lync, and SharePoint on top of email, OneDrive, and new Office 2013. Too many disconnected tools!

It is great news that the new ‘Groups’ solution is launching to all Office 365 users starting today for early release subscribers and will continue with general availability by the end of 2014. It is a place for ad hoc teams to collaborate through email, calendars, files and conversations in one place. For everyone who has hesitated to roll out Yammer, this is a great way to get started on enterprise social collaboration.

Public and private groups are possible and you may include participants outside of your organization. Conversations come back to your inbox so everything can be done in Outlook or through the Group site on Office 365 Web Access.  A Group calendar can be created and synced automatically to your personal calendar. All files are stored in the OneDrive for Business workplace. Search is again a powerful productivity tool for group members to find information fast.

Unfortunately, this initial release is via the Outlook or Office 365 WEB APP only. Exciting news is that Lync and Yammer will be added to the equation soon, and many more features are coming in 2015.

• Note for IT Teams: you can impose access request controls for external sharing and you can manage Group membership in the Office 365 Admin center

• Nice YouTube Video: http://youtu.be/t3OLvYXepvE

• Some sample screen shots enclosed below where we started a small conversation about event we are holding on Tuesday- sharing links, photos, presentations, etc. with automatic emails to the team.

• Enclosing links to additional support and instructions about Groups that you can post on your SharePoint Intranet

• Great comparison chart describing the differences between Groups, Distribution Lists, Site Mailboxes, Shared Mailbox and Public Folders

• As always, please let us know if we can assist you with Office 365 administration, training or support!

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Find help about groups in Office 365

A group is a shared workspace for email, conversations, files, and calendar events where group members can conveniently collaborate and quickly get stuff done. To learn how to use and manage groups to be even more productive, check out the topics below.

Getting started

• Learn more about groups
• Create and navigate a group
• Find, join, or leave a group
• Create and navigate a group
• Find, join, or leave a group
• Add or remove a group as a favorite
• Group conversations
• Share group files
• Using a group calendar
• Using a group on a mobile device
• Manage a group
• Delete a group
• Collaboration in Office 365
• View, create, and delete Groups in the Office 365 admin center
• Manage Group membership in the Office 365 admin center
• Disable Group creation

Using groups day-to-day

Managing groups

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Collaboration in Office 365

Office 365 encourages collaboration through Groups, distribution lists (also called distribution groups), site mailboxes, shared mailboxes, and public folders. Each of these options has a different purpose, user experience, and feature set. What to use depends on what the user needs to do and which tools your organization provides.

Summary of collaboration options

This table explains the various collaboration options available to you with Office 365.

Which collaboration tool to use?

The following table gives you a quick glance at the various types of groups and explains when and how to use them with the various collaboration features of Office 365.