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. 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. Microsoft plans to eventually integrate Groups with Yammer, and selections of Groups content will appear in individual Delve feeds and in a Delve-managed profile page associated with the Group.