[ #Office365 #SharePoint ] The new landscape for end-users, part 1: Groups and Modern Document Library

Fourth article from a series on [ #Office365 #SharePoint ] The new landscape

The new landscape
Old and new challenges and what to expect from MS Ignite
The big picture
The new landscape for end-users, part 1: Groups and Modern Document Library
The new landscape for end-users, part 2: Modern lists, SharePoint Mobile app and more…
The new landscape for power users
The new landscape for developers and IT Pros

With such a flow of news (new products, new features, new capabilities) we started to describe in the 3 first post of this series, it can be difficult for customers to catch up and have a clear idea of where we are in terms of functionalities and how change will impact them.

So let’s try to summarize a little bit what have been announced and delivered since #futureofsharepoint event in May.

1. Office 365 Groups are now the foundation of end-users experience in Office 365.

Introduced in production tenants since September 2014 (see here [ #Office365 ] Chapter 1 of Groups is written, and so what? ) they have been largely improved and enhanced with new capabilities. To name the most appealing features, we have:

Support for external guest access eventually! This was one of the very first request improvdment for groups.

Please note that adding a guest to a group needs owner approval:

This option can be fully turned off at tenant level:

Link with SharePoint teamsite: this was also a popular request for improvements. We could since the beginning use the great way provided by Groups to manage users and use the groups as a security group in SharePoint but now the storage part of the group is no longer a OneDrive space (as it was in the early days of Groups) but rather the document library of a SharePoint site associated with the Group.

So the capabilities here are the same we have with the new SharePoint libraries (more on this below).

Support in Outlook 2016

Discovery dialog for Groups

Full mobile support as we now have:
- iOS app for iPhone AND iPad (since version 1.10.11)
- Android app
- Windows phone app

From a governance perspective, we have had the following important additions:

Restricting Groups creation to a certain set of admins. By default, all users in a tenant can create groups, which is cool for small to medium organizations but can’t be appropriate for big organizations. So you can now create a security group that will define the people that are allowed to create groups.
- This is described in this page: Manage Office 365 Group creation
- And here is a very good post on how to use it: Management capabilities for Office 365 Groups
Updatable privacy type (from public to private and vice-versa)

Be aware of some limits around Groups:

2. SharePoint modern libraries

Even if you didn’t follow all the news about Office 365 this is the second most important message you should get: SharePoint is back… with a new interface. In just a few month, good old bits were changed radically with, however, a willing to keep upward compatibility.

First the document libraries where updated to what is called a modern UI. Interface is faster and responsive.

With simplified menus (called command bar, similar to what was introduced in OneDrive a few time ago),

Among the new features, we can quote:

Creating links to files outside the library

Pinning up to 3 files on top of the page is very cool

Copy has been improved and let you create folders on the fly

Move is similar but is still lacking a way to copy to other document libraries in the tenant

Metadata are there, yeah! You can very conveniently set metadata by drag and dropping files in the “grouped by” view

You can easily add a new column on the fly:

and columns can be resized which is great!

Open in explorer view is still there
The document information panel gives very interesting information on the document. Some of them were previously difficult to get like “recent activity”