What are Office 365 Groups

In this Office 365 article, we will discuss What are Office 365 groups? What are the advantages of Office 365 groups? How to create an office 365 group? How to join an office 365 group? Shared team site on Office 365 group name, Where we can see all Office 365 groups?

Office 365 Groups – Video tutorial

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What are Office 365 groups?

Office 365 group are really helpful in providing collaboration feature in organizations. By using Office 365 groups you can collaborate with your teammates when writing documents, creating spreadsheets, working on project plans, scheduling meetings, or sending email etc.

By using groups in Office 365, you can choose a group of people you want to collaborate with. In Office 365 groups, you can share various resources with those groups of people like shared Outlook inbox, shared calendar or a document library for collaborating on files.

All the permissions are handled by the office 365 group itself, you do not need to do any permission manually. Instead of distribution lists or shared mailboxes, we can use Office 365 groups which provide lots of other benefits.

Advantages of Office 365 groups

Once you create an Office 365 group below are the things you will get automatically:

• You will get a shared email inbox which will have an email address, you can accept email messages from outside organizations also.
• You will get a shared calendar for scheduling events related to the group.
• It will also provide a Shared OneNote Notebook to gather ideas, research, and information.
• It will also provide a planner for assigning and managing project tasks among your group members.
• It will also provide a SharePoint document library to store and share files. And also it will provide a SharePoint team site where you can store contents related to the group.

How to create office 365 groups

We can create Office 365 groups from various places below:

• Office 365 Admin Center
• Outlook
• Outlook on the web
• Outlook Mobile
• SharePoint
• Planner
• Microsoft Team
• Yammer

To create Office 365 group, you should have one of the below subscriptions:

• Office 365 Business Essentials
• Office 365 Business Premium
• Office 365 Enterprise E1
• Office 365 Enterprise E3
• Office 365 Enterprise E5

If you have not signup for an Office 365 subscription, then Sign up for an Office 365 SharePoint Online trial account FREE.

We will see here, how to create office 365 groups in the modern admin center as well as in the classic admin center.

Login to Microsoft 365 Admin center. Click on Groups -> Add a group.

Then choose a group type as Office 365 group like below:

Then provide a name and description for the Office 365 groups.

In the next screen, we can assign owners to Office 365 groups.

Now, provide an email address for the Office 365 group.

Also, you can select, if you want to make the Office 365 group public or private.

If you will make your Office 365 group as public, then anyone can see the group contents.

If you will make the Office 365 group as Private, then only members of the group can see the group content.

Then it will show the default to review before creating the group. You can click on Edit link to edit the content.

Once you click on Create group. the Office 365 group will be created.

You can see the newly created group in the Groups like below:

Login to Portal.Office.com and then click on the App Launcher and then Admin which will open the Admin center.

Then from expand Groups from the left side and then click on Add a group.

Here choose like below:

• Type: Choose Office 365 group
• Name: Give a unique name for the group
• Group Id: Give a unique id for the group, it will display if the group id is available or not.
• Description: Give a short description of the group.
• Privacy: Choose the privacy settings as per the requirement.
• Language: Choose the language.

Then it will create the Office 365 group.

Create Office 365 group from Outlook web

We can also create Office 365 group from Outlook web.

Open outlook in office 365 web. Then on the left side, you can see Groups. Once you take mouse cursor, you can see a + (plus) button. Click on the plus button. Alternatively, you can also click on + Create button below:

You can provide a name for Office 365 group and Office 365 will check if the group email address is available or not. If it is available it will display in green colour as available. You can put optional Description.

By setting up privacy settings in Office 365 group, you can limit the access to the groups. If you will set Private, then group owner and members can see, if you will make public then other users inside your organization can see.

Then you can click on create. After this, you can also add members to office 365 groups. Not only internal users, you can also add external users. In the below group you can see I have added Gmail address also. Sometimes you may need to collaborate with external users, this feature will help.

You can see the group created successfully like below:

How to join Office 365 Group from outlook web?

You can join the group from outlook web. From App launcher click on Mail. Then here under Groups, you can all your groups which you have created or subscribed. If you want to search for new groups you can click on Discover and it will search for groups.

Here also you can create groups by clicking on the Create link button.

Shared Team Site on Office 365 Group Name

Once you create Office 365 group, it will create a shared team site with the name of Office 365 group. Like If we create a group name as “Office365GroupFromOutlookWeb”, the team site will be created as like below:

https://onlysharepoint2013.sharepoint.com/sites/office365groupfromoutlookweb

The team site will have documents library, pages, site contents, Recycle bin etc. So you can use the team site features.

Where to see all Office 365 groups?

We can easily see all the Office 365 groups from the Office 365 Admin center or also we can see all the office 365 group details from Exchange Admin center.

Open Office 365 Admin center and then from the left side you can expand Groups and then click on Groups where you can see all the groups which include your Office 365 groups as well as if any security groups any.

Or alternatively you can go to Exchange admin center and there you can see all the Office 365 groups like below:

Read some Office 365 tutorials:

• How to set modern homepage in classic SharePoint site in SharePoint Online Office 365?
• Hub Sites SharePoint Online Office 365 Tutorial Download PDF Free
• How to set Targeted release or First Release in Office 365 tenant?
• Office 365 incoming and outgoing mail server details
• Chatbot in Office 365
• Office 365 steps to Remove Former Employee License and User account

In this tutorial, we learned:

• What are Office 365 groups?
• Advantages of Office 365 groups
• How to create office 365 groups
• Create Office 365 group from Outlook web
• How to join Office 365 Group from outlook web?
• Shared Team Site on Office 365 Group Name
• Where to see all Office 365 groups?