Blog, Productivity
Microsoft’s owned Office 365 Group is a perfect method to provide a common platform for different products of Microsoft in a single place. It has been made to apply policies as a whole instead of each product. Office 365 Group has now become a new security group of files.
Microsoft came up with this new functionality in 2015 to provide an easy way for site administration, meta-management, email content, calendar sharing and storage space security.
Our this post will tell you about Office 365 group and some of its amazing features, which everyone needs to know. Let’s start with the definition of Office 365 Groups and know what exactly it means.
What is Office 365 Groups?
Office 365 Group is a channel or medium to provide a shared workspace for your team members. This allows you to make and store files and documents along with shared email. You can either add or remove new members to the group with the help of group administrators.
With ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ option, you can manage, who will see the content of the group. If you want that your content could be seen by everyone, select ‘Public’ option, otherwise, go for ‘Private.' You can now click on create button.
Now your group is ready to go to join new members.
7 Features in Office 365 Groups That You Need To Use
1. Manage Group Creation
Office 365 Group offers users to create new groups by default. One user can create upto 250 groups. Therefore, you need to manage the limit of group creation.
A number of services offered by Office 365 Group to create groups for various functions. For example, when a user makes a plan via Microsoft Planner, it will possibly create a new group.
These policies allow you to manage and control groups creation. You also get this facility to disable group creation in Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Planner, SharePoint, and Outlook.
2. The Addition of Group Members
Anyone can join and create a group without getting send a request to the site owner, but for this, you have to set the group as Public. On the other side, if you want to join a Private Group, you need to send an email request to the group administrator, who has the right to accept or reject your request.
After joining the group, users can get the access of Calendar, Team Site, OneNote notebook and group mailbox.
3. Guest Access Feature
Guest access feature allows you to share your documents, files, messages, calendar, etc. to the outsiders. The group administrator or owner can provide access to other people outside organization such as suppliers, consultants, partners, and vendors. The only requirement is that the outsider, who wants to join the group, has a valid email address.
Firstly, the guest will receive an invitation to join the group via email along with the information regarding the group. Guest access could be enabled by default feature. Guest member can receive any information vias email but not has the permission to view the group site.
The guest member can receive and send view shared files, replies to the chats and meeting invitations.
4. Dynamic Membership
Office 365 Group comes with the facility of dynamic membership. It defines membership based on users properties. You can create group membership with the help of Azure Active Directory.
When you change user’s properties, it will update his membership that helps in managing bigger groups easily. This feature removes all the existing user permissions after enabling it for the group.
5. Restore Deleted Groups
This is one of the ultimate features of Office 365 Group. Whenever, you delete any group, Office 365 provides you 30 days to retain it. At this time, it is considered as a ‘soft deleted’ group.
If you restore the group within this period, it will again appear in the navigational panel of your Outlook profile. The restored content includes Planner, Shared inbox, SharePoint online files, Shared calendar, Yammer Group, SMTP address of the group and Objects, properties and members of Azure Active Directory.
You also have the option to delete the group permanently before 30 days. It might take upto 24 hours to delete the full content.
6. To Manage labels
Office 365 group allows you to create a label for categorizing different kinds of emails, docs, and content. You can keep, push or delete the content to archive as per its retention policy.
For instance, there are a number of different kinds of content which can’t be deleted, modified or to retain for a particular duration such as credit card details of employees and income tax forms.
Labels in Office 365 helps you to take certain actions related to the content.
Steps to follow with labels:
- You can apply labels, when it matched with already set conditions.
- Now, apply a default label to a documentary library in SharePoint and Office 365 group sites.
- Allow people to apply labels to the content present in Office 365 groups, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Outlook.
- Now manage and implement records of emails and documents in Office 365. You can use labels to diversify content as a kind of record.
- After it classified content as a record, no one can delete or modify it.
7. View Activity Report
The report dashboard feature provides you the opportunity to view your different activities related to various Office 365 products. Therefore, you can have an insight into all the activities in Office 365. It allows you to get the information about current activities of each product offered by Office 365.
You can anytime see the details of all the newly created group and its reports from 7 days to 6 months.
To see a report:
- Sign in with your Office 365 administration account.
- Get to the admin center and pick Reports -> Usage.
- Now choose Office 365 Reports from the ‘Select A Report’ list.
- Analyze the report by viewing Storage, Groups and Activity Chart.
Final Words
So, these are some dynamic features of Office 365 Group, which are very useful for everyone to know as it will help you to finish your important office task which you can’t hold on for longer.