Yesterday Microsoft announced that the first phase of the Office 365 groups feature has been released.
What are Office 365 Groups?
Most of the applications across the Office 365 suite have some form of group implementation and to have to sync and manage these across apps requires development. Let’s face it we have SharePoint Groups, Yammer Groups, Exchange Distribution so it was only logical that MS gave us “one way”.
With the introduction of Office 365 Groups MS are now moving to a single unified Groups infrastructure and as I understand this is all made possible with Azure AD Groups. Once it’s fully implemented you will create a group in one 365 App and be able reuse it across them all.
What are you thoughts on the Groups feature? Personally, we’ve been watching this feature for a while as we have plans to use it on our new Cloud App. When this comes to SharePoint, I am also interested to see how Groups manifests itself and how we will be able to do things like assign permissions.
Good stuff.
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I agree about Yammer/Lync integration. The distinction between sync and async messaging now is moot… but then really email belongs in this cluster too. Microsoft Wave anyone?
Seems like a good start. Yammer is powerful but still too separate from the rest of Office 365. If Groups is any indication of the future and continued Yammer Integration with Office 365 then this is very positive. I would even like to see a merging of Yammer / Lync into a single client.
Its good hear but It would more live if the sharepoint secutiy groups can talk to Yammer. I understand this complete separate entity.
The troubling thing for me is that until this is fully rolled out and integrated, it is in fact doing the opposite of its intended purpose: it’s creating additional, redundant and confusing silos for discussion, file sharing, and permissions.
And permissions will be where the rubber meets the road. But Microsoft has been getting better with permissions in SharePoint so I do hold out hope.
