Office 365 Groups get SharePoint Sites
Microsoft is rolling out SharePoint Sites as part of their Groups offering in Office 365 beginning this month. The premise is when a Microsoft Group is set up, not only will the group get common notebooks and a Yammer site, but they will also get a SharePoint Team Site as part of the deployment.
Making sense of Office 365 and SharePoint Team Sites
Sounds confusing, right? Well it starts to clear up the confusion when you look at it from a different perspective. No longer do you have to choose which is a better fit for your group. Now if you focus on Groups, you can be confident the collaborative space you are using will scale up as needed into a SharePoint Team Site should it be required.As Office 365 continues to grow in enterprise and business deployments the development of a comprehensive and cohesive strategy becomes critical for long term success. The strategy needs to include what collaboration tools to use when and how. Integration of this functionality by Microsoft makes the decisions easier but does not change the need for analysis and planning.Looking over the operation of an organization, specifically around how team members collaborate and coordinate their work, and applying the features from Office 365 to optimize that operation can make all the difference in the success of the cloud based solution. Three key questions you want to ask your team prior to rolling out Office 365 collaboration features are:
- How do you communicate most frequently between team members?
- What are you communicating?
- What is not working as part of those communications?
A better understanding of the natural communications processes between your team members helps you determine what will benefit from new tools and what should remain with the current ones. Office 365 Groups and SharePoint are a powerful combination. Offering features and functions to help your teams work together the most important thing they leave up to you is to come up with a plan.