Coming up. Have you seen the Groups option in Office 365?
Well, today we take a look at Office 365 Groups.
A new self-service capability to accelerate team collaboration.
From collaboration experiences in mail, calendar, files and tasks
to integration other Microsoft Cloud services like Power BI and Dynamic CRM.
And if you're in IT or a developer
keep watching the see the new management controls, reporting and extensibility options.
Microsoft Mechanics
I'm joined by Christophe from the Microsoft Office 365 team.
So we've had Office 365 Groups for a while now, but what is new?
Think of Groups as an easy way to get started with your team
Whether you are working on an event, a project
or just been promoted as a manager and you want to start communicating with your team.
And here what you're looking at is Outlook on the web
and I can easily create a group by hitting a plus sign
and I'm just going to type a project name and just hit create.
And I can add you Jeremy.
Automatically.
Press Add.
And in seconds, as you've seen what it's done
it's created an entry in Azure Active Directory
and from there on, that team has a number of ways to collaborate.
As you see, it's got an inbox to discuss things
It's got shared calendars
It's got a shared set of files
and a shared notebook to start ideation or taking notes.
So it's much easier to spin up one of these groups then it would have been to create a distribution list
or other things we've had in the past?
Correct. One of the big values that customers really enjoy is the notion of self-service
that anyone can create those teams, those projects and get going
Now instead of continuing here
we just created it, it doesn't have a lot of data
let's transition to an existing project that we've been working on
and in this case we're launching a new product.
You can see here it's got some existing discussions
that the team had, for instance here, I've shared a great YouTube Channel.
And you see, I also have gestures
social gestures to approve and acknowledge some of the great work the team is doing.
The other thing that really helps with collaboration is this notion of a shared calendar
You can see here, in blue, is my work calendar at Contoso
and in red are specific events in respect to the team.
For instance, later on today
we've got an 'Opportunity Review' to look at some of the data for this marketing opportunity
for this new product.
And I want to make sure I don't miss this opportunity.
So I can easily add this specific instance
to my work calendar
so that it's on my favorite mobile device and I've got now excuse to miss this specific thing.
You see, it took a couple seconds and now it's part of my calendar.
Right.
Now the other thing here and again, we're working on a project
that Groups gives us is the ability to manage tasks.
You can see here Planner is something we've just started rolling out to first release customers
You can see here, I've got a dashboard of different projects I'm working on.
If we double click back to that project we're working on
the product launch.
you can see there's already a very visual representation
of work that needs to get done.
And you can see I've got different tasks
and another way to look at it
is this particular chart view
For instance, in this view I can easily see tasks that are being assigned.
For instance, here is a video that needs to be produced
and I think I know the right guy to help with that.
So I'm just going to assign that to you Jeremy.
I might be able to help you there
And voila!
So we have assigned a task to you Jeremy.
One more thing I want to do is, I want the team to review
a document by noon today
which is our product strategy.
Here I'm typing a message and
you can see here, I can automaticly
point to the existing file.
Here I am picking the product strategy that we've been working on.
I'm going to attach that as a OneDrive attachment, so that again, there's only one source of truth.
And team members don't have to mess with different versions as attachments.
I'm just going to do that.
Now the next thing that we know happens particularly when we collaborate
is we might need a quick call to discuss some specific things about the projects.
And again, because Groups is an object in Active Directory
here I'm transitioning to, for instance, Outlook 2016, which is also integrated with Groups.
You can see over the definition of a Group
and I can have a quick poll with the team that I just initiated.
Because it's in Skype it will work across multiple devices like we got here on our phone.
There we are now. We've got a group conversation going.
We've got, at least, the two of us currently on the phone
but also the other two participants have been dialed as well
So yeah, correct.
Automatically, it will see who is available.
So here you are on the call. You are able to make it.
One thing I want to do for the team members
that aren't there, is to make sure we document any decisions
I can easily initiate a note
and I'm just going to pick an existing notebook we've been using for the team
And voila! It's going to record the attendees
and we can easily take notes on the actions that we've agreed on.
So beyond all of this
were also doing a lot in terms of being able to collaborate on documents together, right?
Now obviously, you're not always in front of a beautiful Surface Book.
So let's show you the experience on the go.
Ok. Let's take a look.
So here on my phone I'm just going to launch the Outlook Groups app.
Right here, it's got the same group that I was part of
that we were having a discussion
you can see it's got the requests of me asking the team members to review by noon
and it looks like you liked it already. So it looks like you're on top of it.
And I'm just going to review the changes that the team members have been making.
So I click on files, click on the Product Strategy Word document.
And you can see here, it's just going to open that document on my phone.
Downloading the latest and greatest with the latest changes.
And I'm going to go in edit mode because I also want to make some changes.
and you can easily see here that
you're yourself as well as editing the document. So this is as real as it gets
Right. Got it open here on my PC.
Great integration with SharePoint, OneDrive, even though it's an Outlook Groups App
Looks like some of the changes have been made.
I can easily go back to the discussions that we're having with the team
I can see that you've made your edits and that's great.
And since this is an important milestone
I also want to notify another team that dependent on this
which is the marketing team.
So you can see I can easily @ mention another team and and post a message
Great, you are speaking also to the integration across, getting the other teams
And one of the other things we've done with the technology
is actually build it into other Microsoft Services.
So we had Michael Tejador on an earlier show, showing Power BI integration
but it's also working in CRM
why don't you tell us about that?
Yes, again the idea is
you know, it's great to work on a beautiful dashboard
or work on a sales opportunity if you are in Dynamics
by the end of the day, you are probably going to have to reach out to folks outside of
let's say, your data scientist, competency or your roll as a seller
And that's what we've done with the Power BI Team
where here you got a dashboard for this project
where we're looking at data on the opportunity analysis for this specific product launch.
But again, we also want to have discussions and collaborate with the team
on specific data points that we're looking at here.
And for instance you can see here
that the product launch is the same group that were using earlier with planner or just having a discussion.
And you can see that I've got all the dashboard reports and data set
And for instance, in this case
maybe that opportunity analysis
I want to maybe add
someone from our finance team to this specific project
and in this case I'm just going to add
Alex from our finance team and you can see how I discover Alex
And voila!
So suddenly Alex is a full time member of this group
and he can help and be a part of the data scrubs and the daily call that we have regarding those data sets.
And beyond the integration with Power BI
something brand new has the ability to connect with external sources of information
straight from within your groups.
The Office 365 Connectors Developer Preview that we've announced recently
you can indeed
bring in information from third party apps.
You can see here
you got a new menu with this developer preview
and in this case we've already configured the Bing connector.
And what this does is
on a daily basis, it's going to curate content
that's discussed based on specific keywords.
So you can see here for instance, last night
you know, the project we're launching is about solar panels
and we want to stay on top of what's going on out there
and you can see I've got curated articles
that came from Bing. And you can see our colleague Anne
has started recommending reading some of those articles.
Very useful for tracking sentiment, especially.
But beyond all this, when I think about this from an IT perspective
and that's kind of where my heart is at
what happens then on the backend when we've got all these groups being created in Azure AD
are there controls to manage that?
Yes, we've made a number of investments over the past year
if you can remember that yes, Groups are stored and managed in Azure
but the workloads it uses are things like
Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to name a few in our backend Office 365
And because of that, there are a number of administration capabilities that are natively offered
Things like eDiscovery, litigation hold, naming policies
and you can even control groups using PowerShell Cmdlets.
So a lot of those controls are inherited from Office 365 from an information protection standpoint but
since the groups are actually stored in Azure AD
are there controls that we can do to manage or audit what's going on in Azure AD?
I'll show you two recent innovations
dynamic membership and audit report.
Ok.
I've got the list of all the groups in Azure.
And for instance, a specific group is called the marketing team.
Now maybe the marketing team is made up of hundreds of thousands of employees in my large organization.
And instead of manually adding or removing members as folks join that organization
I can easily configure dynamic membership
and you can see here I've got a tab
and I've set it to 'yes'
And you can see here I'm doing a query based on an attribute
that I got in my directory around department
containing the word 'marketing'.
So this means it's going to automatically add people who have that attribute of 'marketing'
into this large group and as they leave marketing
conversely it will remove them from that group, right?
Absolutely, you don't have to worry about doing that manually
That's going to save a ton of time in terms of maintaining those groups
but we've also done a lot from a reporting perspective.
Indeed, so here I'm in the reporting section in Azure
and you can see I'm going to scroll down to the audit report.
And what this does is
it gives me all the activities that are happening around groups
and for instance every time a group is created
everyone a group is deleted
everyone someone added a memeber to a group
everyone changed a name of a group
So again, it enables you as the administrator to always know
everything that is going on in respect to Groups within your organization
This will really help people monitor all the activities going from an Azure AD perspective but
I know we announced quite a few different other controls in December; why don't you tell us about those?
The first one is 'Hidden Membership' it's been a top ask for a lot of customers
it will give you the ability to obfuscate the list of members or member of a group.
Second one is 'Group expiry'.
So that the groups that are being used that maybe an ad hoc team created
that no one is using anymore, it will give you the ability to expire that group
and recover the contents stored across Exchange and SharePoint for instance.
And the last one that you've been asking for is 'Hybrid guidance'
for all the users that still have mailboxes on prem.
So we're going to be publishing documentation on
how you use Azure Active Directory connect to support that scenario
And I know for all the developers out there you are probably wondering
can I do some of those integration we saw like on Power BI
or in CRM for my own line of business apps? Are we also providing those extensibility options?
Yes, we've announced last November the release of the Microsoft Graph.
And the Microsoft Graph helps you interact with the different API endpoints with the Microsoft Cloud
And as you cans see
here we do have have fully supported rest API
to either create Groups, update groups
or just inject conversations conversations from lets say, line of business apps.
similar to what our partner teams at Microsoft have done
such as the Power BI team or Dynamics team to integrate with Groups
So lot's of great new capabilities but where is this all going?
We think Groups is a key part of collaborations in the future
and a great alternative to distribution groups
There are a number of innovations that are coming
and for instance the first one is we are going to deliver guest access
so folks outside of you Active Directory can be a full team member
and engage and collaborate across all those modalities that I have showed you.
Other things we are going to be doing is deeper SharePoint integration
We're also going to integrate with Delve.
And last but not least, yes, Yammer will integrate with Office 365 Groups.
Welcome news for a lot of people. So where would I get started if I wanted to use Groups right now?
Well, again groups are available in your favorite tennant today
so I highly encourage you to start leveraging it to collaborate on projects.
So if you haven't started already start using Groups
and keep checking back to the Office blog and Microsoft Mechanics.
Thanks for watching.
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics