Microsoft 365 Groups (formerly known as Office 365 Groups) is a cross-application membership service in Microsoft 365. Each Microsoft 365 group lives in Azure Active Directory, has a list of members and is attached to that group’s related Microsoft 365 workloads, including a SharePoint team site, Exchange mailbox, Planner, Power BI, OneNote—and, optionally, a team in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft 365 Groups provides a way to centralize membership for multiple Microsoft products in one place. It’s the new Active Directory security group of the file share days.
You can expect to be working with Microsoft 365 Groups more and more as it is the main cross-application membership service for all of the integrated products in Microsoft 365. That’s why we decided to create the following series of articles, to help you get familiar with Microsoft 365 Groups.
By default, anyone in your organization can create Microsoft 365 groups
There are various ways to restrict and manage self-service creation for Microsoft 365 groups.
A group gets created automatically when you do the following in these products:
Planner: Create a new plan
SharePoint: Create a new site collection
Outlook: Create a new group
Power BI: Create a new workspace
Teams: Create a new team
Each group can have up to 10 owners and 1000+ members/subscribers
External members are called guests and are not the same as external users in SharePoint
Groups can be private or public, although private does not mean hidden
Additional options available for Microsoft 365 Groups
Privacy, (or –AccessType in PowerShell) defines the type of a group. Anyone can see the content and conversations of a Public group. What is more, anyone can join such a group, without approval from a group owner. Private groups are different: only members can see the content of those groups and joining such a group requires approval from a group owner.
Subscribe members – Subscribing to a group is not the same as joining the group. If you subscribe to a Microsoft 365 Group, it is like saying “I want to know everything that happens there.” The Subscribe Members option makes subscriptions of new members automatic.