Office 365 Groups in OWA

Groups are collaboration spaces for members to hold text conversations, maintain a shared calendar, and share files. Members can access a Group in Outlook Web App (OWA) via a Groups tab as shown here (left). Group conversations appear in the middle, with individual messages of the selected conversation at right. (Some items have been obscured for security or privacy.)

Typical Groups might include participants in a project, members of a discipline in a company (such as sales), or employees in a department. Groups are public by default, enabling anyone in the organization to join, but a group can be made private, in which case a user designated as an administrator must invite new members. This behavior is similar to Yammer groups, but Groups are not yet integrated with Yammer. In contrast to Yammer, users do not have a Newsfeed page to aggregate and filter traffic across Groups, but they can subscribe to a Group and receive all messages sent to that group in their e-mail inboxes.

Each Group also includes a shared Exchange calendar that users can access in OWA. A Group also includes a SharePoint document library for shared files, which is accessed through a Web user interface similar to that of a OneDrive for Business site. File permissions are set automatically for members, and users can edit Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word documents in the library with the Office Online browser-based applications. Groups memberships and other security information are stored in Azure Active Directory, which is the directory service used by Office 365 and other Microsoft-hosted applications.