Office 365 Groups Adding Better Administrative Controls

Office 365 Groups, a team collaboration feature of Office 365, is rapidly adding new features that should give organizations better control over its use. The Groups roadmap includes eDiscovery, auditing, and other improvements that help reduce risk and enforce corporate policy. Some features are now available, while others are planned for 2016. While these features may make reliance on Groups more appealing to some organizations, many of the features are still in the “upcoming” stage and could be released with changed or diminished functionality, or could disappear entirely.

What Are Groups?

An Office 365 group is an Azure Active Directory group that owns a set of Office 365 resources (such as a shared mailbox, calendar, document library, and OneNote notebook). These resources are automatically created for each new group but stored in separate Office 365 services; for example, the document library of a group is kept in the customer’s SharePoint storage.

Groups first appeared in Outlook for the Web to offer collaboration spaces in which group members can hold persistent text discussions and share calendars, files, and other data. The Outlook 2016 desktop application and a series of mobile apps now offer access to Groups, and related Microsoft online services such as Power BI and Dynamics CRM have begun using Groups for resource sharing.