Microsoft Connects SharePoint Team Sites to Office 365 Groups

Now you can create connected SharePoint Online team sites in seconds, Microsoft promises. Acting on a promise it made in August, Microsoft is introducing SharePoint and Office 365 team sites integration.

“No matter where users create an Office 365 Groups group (from Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Yammer and more), they will consistently get a full-powered, modern SharePoint Online team site,” Microsoft explained in a blog post.

As of today, the functionality is available to all First Release customers. It  will be gradually rolled-out to other Office 365 customers over the coming weeks.

Joining Office 365 Groups, SharePoint

Office 365 Groups is a service that enables teams to come together by creating a single team identity and a single set of permissions across Office 365 apps.

SharePoint team sites provide a place where teams can communicate, share documents and work together on projects. They are easy to use and enable users create a site for every project the team is working on.

Team sites are accessible on all kinds of devices so can be used by mobile workers too.

Here’s how the new integration works. When someone creates an Office 365 Group, the service will automatically create a SharePoint team site (with the appearance controlled by the team site administrator) that can include pages, lists, libraries and team news.

This is just the latest upgrade to team sites, which also received new document editing and collaboration capabilities at in August. That upgrade also introduced several changes to web parts, enabling users add documents, videos, images, site activities, Yammer feeds, as well documents.

Microsoft indicated there are even more upgrades to come.

SharePoint 2016 Feature Pack 1

The team sites upgrade is part of a wider set of upgrade announcements from Microsoft for SharePoint.

The company also unveiled Feature Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2016 and SharePoint Online. While a lot of the improvements this time around are for administrators, there are also a few for business users — including one that makes hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments easier to control.

Of note in this respect is SharePoint Insights, a new hybrid feature that aims to provide better management of hybrid environments by offering access to reports and dashboards in Office 365.

In addition Hybrid Taxonomy, which has been released in preview, enables users to bring their taxonomy store to Office 365. Using it, enterprise will be able to create a single-source for developing and managing Terms, Term Sets and Groups through a single Managed Metadata Service.

Other changes worth noting is the new design for OneDrive for Business that provides a cleaner and easier to use user experience through one click access to commonly used functions like edit, upload and share.

Microsoft has also made file management a lot easier with the introduction of drag-and-drop features for folder management that works a lot like it does with folders on PCs.