Wictor Wilen

As you might have noticed I’m a big fan of Office 365 Groups, aka Unified Groups. I do think they will play a major role in the future of Office 365 Collaboration. Office 365 Groups consists of many moving parts, some that are half baked, some that are not working at all and some that is a bit difficult to understand. In this series of posts, will be published over the next few weeks and after that when needed, I will describe how you as an Office 365 Admin can and should work with Office 365 Groups.

In the last post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I showed you how to manage the Unified Groups using PowerShell. Let’s continue on that journey and take a look at how you can manage the Group memberships using PowerShell. All membership management are done using the *-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlets, you can access them using PowerShell and connecting to Exchange Online as shown in the previous post. The cmdlets is at the moment that well documented. If that changes I’ll make sure to update this post (and please remind me).

One of the loudest complaints I hear from people when we talk about Groups is the lack of management features, so in this post in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you can manage your Unified Groups using PowerShell. In the previous post I actually already showed you how to use PowerShell to create Groups, but let’s take a step back. Connecting PowerShell to Exchange Online To start working with the Unified Groups in PowerShell we need to connect to Exchange Online and we do that by establishing a PowerShell session to a specific Uri, see code sample below, and then import that session to our local session. This means we do not have to install any PowerShell module or similar. This is how it should look like:

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you as an admin and your end-user can create Office 365 Groups. The option to allow end-users to create Unified Groups or not are determined by the Mailbox Policy, as described in a previous post. End-user creation of Office 365 Groups End-users have two ways of creating new Groups; either use the Office 365 web interface or using Outlook 2016 (works on the PC edition, not sure about Office on Macintosh). This is option is by default available for ANYONE within your organization, there is no granularity at all, there is no approval or anything.

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will talk about the small but important policies we can apply to Group creation. At the moment there is very little control of the actual Office 365 Group creation in Office 365. And this tends to be one really important aspect of the Unified Groups discussion - can we allow them or not? I do hope that I over the time can update this post with new and improved governance features.

This is the third post in my Office 365 Groups for Admins series and it will focus on one of the primary tasks an Office 365 Admin has to do once their tenant is up and running; should we allow our users to create Office 365 Groups or not? I’m not going to give you an answer to this. It is something you need to evaluate properly within your organization, but I do recommend that you initially always turn off Groups, so that you can get some governance into the game before promoting it to everyone.

In this first post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will show you where you have the different entry points for the Unified Groups. It’s important to understand this as it is important in the posts to follow. Office 365 Mail (end users) The first and perhaps the most obvious point of Office 365 Groups is in the Office 365 Mail application (Outlook Web App, OWA). On the left hand side you will see the Groups heading. Under that heading 10 of the Groups you are member of are shown, with your Favorites on top.

Some “small” updates this week on the Office Roadmap Changes 2015-07-22 Now Launched Office 365 Groups: Power BI Integration: A new and easier way for teams/groups to collaborate in Power BI. Directly to launched. In Development Office 365 User Purchases: An interesting new option for the Store. Individuals can with this feature in place “purchase and individually own a subscription to additional software”. Looks like if your manager doesn’t approve of your Visio request, you can buy it on your own :)

A week has gone since last update to the Office Roadmap and it looks like the Office 365 team is on a good pace. Changes 2015-07-16 These are the changes I’ve noticed on the Roadmap, including my personal comments/take on some of them. One big shocker here and it’s in the Cancelled section, check it out! Now Launched Multi-Tier Cloud Standard for Singapore: something brand new that is just for Singapore that is launched? No description at all on the Roadmap - I’ll get back with details. Quarantine Message Body Preview: last week rolling out and now fully rolled out. Exchange admins can now really easy preview stuff in quarantine. SharePoint Online storage usage model: “Auto” quotas are now fully rolled out Workload-specific admin roles: Also the new admin roles are fully rolled out Rolling Out Office 2013 Windows client modern authentication preview: new ADAL based AuthN is rolling out In Development Office Online Edit in Yammer: Allows you to edit documents directly in Yammer. New on the roadmap PSTN Calling in Skype for Business: US Only, more countries coming up, PSTN Call in feature. More awesome S4B features! Public Folders: adding and removing favorites in OWA: Who said Public Folders was dead! Cancelled Document Conversations for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: CANCELLED! No surprise to me. Another Yammer feature that is going in to the bin. If Microsoft can do a big write-down on Surface, they sure should do it on Yammer as soon as possible. From Rolling Out. Moved off into Previously Released (Added since original post)