What happens when you create a office group and what you should know about office 365 groups

Sriram Varadarajan
 
Solution Architect
September 29, 2016
 
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To put in one line, Office 365 Groups is a platform that is integrated across 0365, be it outlook SharePoint site (group site), Planner in one single place.In this article let us see how to create an Office 365 group

Login to Office 365 Admin Portal: https://portal.office.com/AdminPortal/Home?switchtomoderndefault=true#/groups

Click the group option in the left tree view:

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Click ADD Group button in the next screen:

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Provide the respective details in the upcoming screen:

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Assume we have created a Group by Name Today’s Task, as I told you earlier a Planner and a SharePoint site (Called a group site) gets created but here comes the news, you can’t find planner directly and with respect to the SharePoint site, you can’t find it anywhere J will talk more on that.

How to see the planner:

You can get in to planner from the Top Bar (If you don’t see it, it may be probably because you don’t have a PLANNER License)

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By clicking on PLANNER, you will see all the planner which are been created; in our case we should be seeing our Planner which is TODAY’S TASK

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To know more about Planner, please refer

Now let’s see how to find the SharePoint site that gets created:

By all means you can’t find the SharePoint site from ADMIN CENTER

1. As of now there are only 2 ways to find the Group Site url once the groups are created:

a. PowerShell – Get-UnifiedGroups command: (This is an exchange command let)

b. Get in to OWA(Outlook webAPP)

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All the group (Assigned to you) would display under the GROUP Link in OWA, click the group Today’s Tasks

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Click the FILE link in the TOP Ribbon:

This would take you the SharePoint site, which is called a GROUP SITE, this would just have an DOCUMENT LIBRARY in it (Looks more like a One Drive)

Note:

If you have an Outlook 2016 would see the group TAB in it as well.

Here comes the next surprise, as I already told we can’t see the SharePoint Office group site anywhere in the OFFICE ADMIN CENTER (But looks like, even from SharePoint API is hidden), here is what happens if you happen to create site collection with the same name of Office group site.

Let’s create a site collection with the same name TODAY’s TASK.

You will end up seeing the error that “SITE ALREADY EXISTS”

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Conclusion: MS is working on showing up the OFFICE GROUP SITE in the Office ADMIN Centre soon.

Future: Office 365 group site is getting changed to TEAM site, please refer

Author Info

Sriram Varadarajan
 
Solution Architect
 
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Sriram is a Technology Evangelist with 15+ years experience in Microsoft Technologies. He is an enterprise architect working for large pharmaceutical organization which has presence globally with largest Microsoft implementation ...read more
 

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