Teamwork Made Easier with Office 365 Groups

With the introduction of Microsoft Office 365 came a particularly handy collaboration tool: Office 365 Groups.

In a modern work environment, it can be extremely difficult to get coworkers on the same page, especially as files and discussions are spread all over different databases. Office 365 Groups puts an end to the madness by allowing users to create a collective work space to get projects done efficiently.

According to the Microsoft Office blog, “When a user joins a group, they immediately gain access to all of the assets of the team, such as conversations, meetings and documents.” In other words, users are able to utilize all the benefits of SharePoint and Exchange on a single platform.

But with this new service came initial obstacles.  It soon became clear that while advantageous for the end-user, these groups were a challenge for IT departments who needed to maintain compliance and naming policies within an organization.

Therefore, Microsoft announced significant changes to its “self-service creation” tool in December. The new features are an effort to enable IT departments to easily manage groups and administer support where needed.

Here’s a look at these new features:

Directory Management

• To maintain cohesive group labels, Microsoft has enabled IT departments to establish certain naming policies for Office 365 Groups. This will keep corporate directories from becoming a mess.
• If administrators want to apply advanced rules to larger groups, they will now be able to do so with dynamic memberships. The feature will allow them set parameters and create rule-based memberships.

Compliance

• With auditing, you can track changes made to a group and find them in the Office 365 Compliance Center. Audit reports give IT departments the capability to see configuration changes and management activity in one place.
• For legal purposes. Organizations may need to place a litigation hold on documents or files. So, Microsoft has implemented  eDiscovery, which gives administrators the capability to find valuable data and maintain user guidelines.

Think Office 365 Groups can make your work easier?  If you’re unsure how to maximize the full potential of the Office 365 suite, enroll in one of our Microsoft training courses today.

Our expert instructors will show you how to get the most out of these programs and increase your overall productivity.