Office 365 Groups update at Ignite 2016

It was an exciting time for Office 365 Groups at Ignite 2016 in Atlanta last month. We had some great sessions, which are now available online to all of you that could not attend. These sessions cover top of mind questions you asked us to discuss, ranging from our collaboration product strategy, use cases, administration and governance, extensibility and key innovations on our product roadmap.

Office 365 Groups is a group membership service that provides a single identity for teams in Office 365 and equips them with a set of group collaboration assets such as a calendar, a OneNote notebook, a Plan to manage tasks and conversations powered by Outlook or Yammer.

Our key Ignite session, Discover Office 365 Groups—overview, administration and roadmap, presented a comprehensive overview and update on Office 365 Groups. We first discussed how group collaboration in the enterprise has evolved to be multi-faceted and how Office 365 addresses the unique needs and workstyle of different groups.

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We presented three common use cases, (a project group, an organization group and an interest group) observed from the millions of users using Groups in different Office 365 applications every month to get work done. We highlighted recent innovations such as the ability to add external team members, a modern SharePoint team site for every group and the new Outlook Groups iPad app to name a few. We then discussed and demoed key administration updates to help you manage and govern groups; features presented included data classification and usage guidelines, dynamic membership, audit log and usage reports and the ability to upgrade a distribution group (DL) with one click via the Exchange admin center.

Attendees asked if we support hybrid scenario with on-premises mailbox and multiple domains and the answer is YES to both. Read “Configure Office 365 Groups with on-premises Exchange hybrid” and “Multi-domain support for Office 365 Groups” to get started.

Last but not least, we showed how Yammer is integrating with Office 365 Groups and recapped key investments across experiences and administration going forward. One popular item we announced is our upcoming work on group preservation and deletion policies. Please see our FastTrack Roadmap for a full list of innovations.

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In addition to the above overview session, watch the following session—targeted at administrators—for an in-depth look at key governance investments available today and in the future:

In addition to the above two sessions mentioned, a dozen others related to Office 365 Groups are listed below:

Overview and use cases

Administration and governance

Partner teams: SharePoint, Planner and Yammer

Thank you all that came to Ignite 2016, attended our sessions and dropped by our booth. We have already announced that Ignite 2017 is going to be in Orlando; in fact, you can already pre-register. See you next year, and until then, please continue to engage with us via our technical community.

—Christophe Fiessinger, @cfiessinger, senior program manager for the Office 365 Groups team

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