Understanding Microsoft 365 Groups with Andy Malone

[Music] I'm a Microsoft MVP as well as a Microsoft certified trainer over the next 20 minutes I'm going to take you on a journey inside a Microsoft Office 365 groups we're going to discover exactly what they are how to set them up and more importantly a few little secrets in between so stick with me okay so let's begin so here I am in my office 365 or Microsoft 365 admin Center and first up I'm gonna go into my admin portal here now in terms of 365 groups you can create them in a number of places as an administrator I can go into the groups area here and I can go into groups and you can create go ahead and create the group so what I'm gonna do now this is a fairly new feature what we have is this metro line type of setup here so the idea is it's a little bit easier to create the groups now in 365 we currently have 4 different types of groups if you're familiar with the old Windows Server and Microsoft Exchange platforms of the of the years gone by you'll be familiar with security groups where you can assign permissions to things like onedrive SharePoint documents what kind of the applications themselves and of course if you're using Microsoft Exchange there are two types of groups distribution lists essentially a distribution group just used for distributing email mail enabled security of course is just the same as a regular security group but the idea is there it's you can assign security with it as well and the one that we're really looking at the one that were really interested in in fact it's actually the default type of group is something called office 365 so the very much the name of the game nowadays is collaboration and collaboration begins with 365 and this kind of again goes back to the old days of Microsoft Exchange where we had something called public folders so this kind of is like that but it goes much more beyond that so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a group and I'm going to call this my I will call this what I call it I'll call this my London HR group ok so I could put in a little description here I'll just say HR staff and I'll click on next so at this point I can set an owner so who's going to own the group that's going to be at kind of any members of staff and you'll notice here that it's going to it's requesting there it integrates it with teams I'll mention that in a second so first up I'm currently logged on as a user called Meghan so I'm gonna just log use Meghan as the current owner of this particular group now in here this is where of course it's interactive it's collaborative at the moment I can assign this group a name now in the past it was whoever created the group you couldn't really change it now it's much more collaborative and much more interesting by the way so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to I'm gonna put in an email address again I'll just call it my London HR group I'll just call it London HR actually now in terms of privacy you can either have a public so anyone can see it that's potentially including guests all private so only members can actually see this particular group I'm I'm going to leave this as public at the moment and it says do you want to add a Microsoft team to this group now that's an important thing to appreciate that Microsoft teams when you create a Microsoft team you also create an office 365 group when you create an office 365 group you have the option not to create an office 365 team but don't worry about that you can come back to that if you want to so I'm going to go ahead and just click Next I got a nice little review and again I'm going to go ahead now and create that group you can see the lights have all gone green here now at this moment I can create another group what I want to do for the purpose of this demo I'm just gonna click on close here ok so as we can see the London HR group has come in so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna select that group now first up you can see here it's telling me that this is an office 365 group this is another change that has recently taken place though there's much more information here I you can see that it's an assigned group so it's assigned with members of users it's a public group and also the date and time it was created and again you can customize those columns as well so you can see we've got a little filter at the top here you can you can view exactly how you want to view those ok so what I'm going to do just scroll back along there let's have a look at this and so the first thing you might want to do is you might want to add some members to your group so again I'm now going to click on member click on members and you can you can see I can manage the owners to the group I can also this is where I can add in members as well ok so I'm going to add some members to the group so I'm gonna click on add and just wait a moment for it to populate ok so I'm gonna bring in Allen and I'm gonna bring in Adele I'm gonna bring in Bob Beverly let me bring in okay I'm going to bring in Christie as well give a second to think about it okay sorry yeah camera it's not about a license that's why okay fantastic okay so you can see I've I've added them those users and again you can add in more as well if you want to so nice and easy I'm going to click on save that okay the membership was added and you can see that those users have now been added in so if i click close so the next thing as you can see I've now added in my users my owner is Megan if I click into settings now couple of things here allow external senders to email this group so if you're using guests if you're honoring guests and access again you might obviously want them to be able to email the group it could be customer it could be suppliers something like that send copies of group conversations again you can choose that and again you can change whether it's private or public now I did mention that I created this group with out creating a Microsoft team so please note that once you do this however is an irreversible action you can't go back so it's a one-way process so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to create a team you can see it says yep you need to you can manage this and the Microsoft team's admin Center fine so I'm going to click on that and again back to general so it tells me when this group was created looks good yeah this this all looks good now and I'm I'm happy with the way that is okay now look what's happened here you can see that now it's a Microsoft team so and if I flip over into the Microsoft team's tab if I just go ahead and reload this page you can see that we now have a London HR group okay so the London HR group by default of course every team in Microsoft Keene teams get a general channel but again you can manage members you can manage content and so on there again that's maybe something they'll possibly do in a future video so what do you get as your Microsoft team sorry is your Microsoft group so as I said that's the first place that you create that now if I flip over into my email again I'm just going to just refresh this page just so we can see everything and when I scroll down you can see that we have groups and as I as I can see you can see that we also have a number of different groups now I'm not put anything in my group yet but you can see that I've got a sales and marketing group for example so what do I get in the group well as you can see I get a collaborative mailbox so I get a shared mailbox between my team of users and other things that we get you also can you get a onedrive so you get a onedrive for business a shared you also get a shared calendar experience a notebook a planner and you also get a SharePoint team site as well so if I just click onto that you'll see that you get this very nice sales and marketing team site and this is a demo one that I set up earlier but the thing is here it's so collaborative so it's not just a case of a Microsoft team you also get in a website you also get a planner you get the calendar really really collaborative much more than that you can also view it in Microsoft Outlook as well um and the other any gotchas yes there are a gotchas wealth first of all who can create groups by default anyone can so be very very careful any user can come into groups here and they can go ahead and create a new group you can also do this so for example if I in if I have my own outlook client as well I would also be able to create groups there so there's a few things that you can do about that to kind of ease that by the way so let me just close these down and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the 365 admin Center again I'm going to go back into groups now just a little note here if you delete a group you delete all of its content so all of that group would go into the deleted group items and it will stay there for 30 days and you can bring that back it doesn't delete users okay so it doesn't delete any kind of users so you can you can easily bring that content back if you want to can I manage groups a little bit better well there's a few places where you can manage groups so I can go just expand this menu here if I go into settings and if I go into settings here so in settings if I scroll down there are a number of this is all your different settings here for you know various applications and things and we've got one here for office 365 groups so by default it says let group members outside your organization access the content so if you're allowing guests access then again that's a video that I'm going to follow up on in the future then this is where that will appear and also let group owners add people outside your organization so again if you've assigned Peter to be a group owner then he can also add people in as well if you want to alright so that is that so the other thing that I'm going to do is I also as well as the admin Center an excellent place to manage groups is if you go in through Asher Active Directory now bearing in mind that as your Active Directory office 365 Microsoft 365 whatever you want to call it it's the same directory service ok so with that in mind if I go into the azure active directory and into groups here you can see exactly the same groups so if I scroll down there's my London HR team on my London HR group you can see it's an assigned it's in the cloud tells me how many users are in it how many members owners and so on ok so that's that's the first thing there so going back to this there's some very interesting settings here on the left hand side so if I go into the general tab here you can see that first of all self-service group management owners can manage group membership requests so there's two ways that you can do group membership it can be assigned or people can request access to the group so do you want that yes or no restrict access to the groups in the Excel access panel so again you might want to restrict it or not security groups users can create security groups in the portals owners can assign members as group owners so do you want owners to assign other group members as owners and so that can be all group owners are only selected ones or none if you choose none only administrators can do this so just be aware of that very important office 365 groups users can create office 365 groups in the portals so yes or no so if you don't want your users creating 365 groups this is a place where you can stop much really important by the way owners can assign members in the admin portals again it's up to yourself so there are some real good options here now we also have a special group here called directory wide this this is everyone this is like an every one group in the old days that we used to have again this is kind of PowerShell you would go in and do this through PowerShell as well cup of really excellent features for groups here in 365 and Azure is the expiry feature so one of the things about office 365 is assuming that anyone can go ahead and create these groups can you imagine it you would potentially quickly get out of control and there's another issue as well what if the group you know a year down the line there's only got a few documents and it maybe it was for a project it's not used not being used for 18 months do you do we really need that group do you want otherwise it's gonna just completely load everything up with groups so one of the other things that we have here is that you can also set a group lifetime so you can set a group lifetime of a of a year you can put in a contact address like an admin or or something like that and enable expiry for these office 365 groups so you can specify which groups are all groups if you want to now the the benefit of that is that and if you do that obviously the group will expire in a year but if it's a heavily used group so if there's a lot of traffic going through that group it doesn't expire it so don't panic ok one of the cool feature that I want to show you also is a naming policy so we have something called the group naming policy and if I flip back into the admin Center and just open up let's say groups again you if I just go into yet office 365 groups you'll see that some of these groups here if I just scroll down some s GE executive as gee engineering for example so this is telling me that you can potentially add a prefix or a suffix to the group so London HR Sales New York HR sales and so on so you can you can have your own little naming parameters that especially if you've got an awful lot of groups it really makes it easy to understand so you can add a prefix or a suffix here now the the other thing that I was going to mention just flip back a screen there the other thing in the naming policy tab is that you can also have blocked words so there's specific words that you don't think there are really I don't I'm not meaning rude words but you know blocked words that you think that are inappropriate you can you can put that there please know you've got a 5,000 word limit maximum now you can add them individually or you can add them through a CSV file a comma separated value file okay how groups are all managed through you can view the audit logs who's creating them who's managing them and and you can also do access reviews as well so if you've got any users who have got the roles or admin roles or you're using things like group managers and things like that then you can you can review that do they still need those permissions and so on so there you have it Microsoft Office 365 groups not only a way of organizing your users but fantastic for collaboration as well I really hope you've enjoyed this little session and come back and see me again I'm Andy Malone thank you very much [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Andy Malone

Views: 14,815

Rating: 4.9597988 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft 365 Groups, Andy Malone, MVPBuzz, Microsoft 365, Office 365

Id: hW7osn9THTQ

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020