Getting off to a good start with Microsoft Office 365 Groups

A must read for anyone contemplating the use Office 365 Groups within their Organization.

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Office 365 Groups are here to stay! and they offer huge benefits for collaboration on projects and daily tasks. It is however extremely easy to just turn this feature on, and then just let the users go crazy.
But you really should consider the following points before jumping the gun.

A few pointers on getting off to a good start with Office 365 Groups (UnifiedGroups):

1. Define a Naming Policy for your groups.
   • Prefix, suffix? Not a practical thing to change once you have 1000 groups…
2. Define one or more custom email domains specific to group creation.
   • E.g. groups.contoso.com. (so groups emails wont clash with regular email account names)
3. Make sure your user know just how much stuff come with these groups**. **
   • It’s A LOT! (Consider setting up training sessions!)
4. Birth them through Teams if you are doing chat based collaboration.
   • Not required though… But it will give the most features OOTB.
     • UPDATE: be aware of this change to outlook behaviour: https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=26955
5. Consider restricting who can create the groups.
   • Or you will have chaos within a short amount of time.
6. Keep in mind that all groups have a file area to store data in.
   • Consider using a login script to have users OneDrive client populated with available file areas.
7. New things happen ALL the time with Office 365 Groups!
   • You should consider reading the official docs!

All of the above items, link to relevant reading / tricks / scripts.
I suggest you dig your teeth into them if you want to get serious about Groups!

The good Adam Fowler has also written a few gotchas!
https://www.adamfowlerit.com/2019/05/office-365-group-as-a-distribution-list-gotchas/

This video from Ignite 2017 is also pretty great for IT Pros wanting to get more info on Office 365 Groups.

There are a lot more areas to consider, but these are a must in my opinion.

Thanks for reading

As always, please follow/like and reach out on Twitter @michael_mardahl