PolyU Email Service Office Group (for Staff ONLY) The Useful Tips and Techniques

Version 1.0 Last Update: 9 May 2016

PolyU Email:

www.polyu.edu.hk/email

ITS HelpCentre Support:

www.polyu.edu.hk/HOTS

ITS HelpCentre Support Hotline:

2766 5900

Table of Contents What is an Office 365 group? ............................................................................................... 2 Collaborating in Office 365 Groups ....................................................................................... 2 Public and private Office 365 groups .................................................................................... 3 Group owners and group members...................................................................................... 3 Discovering and joining Office 365 groups ........................................................................... 3 Conversations and e-mail ..................................................................................................... 4 Group calendar ..................................................................................................................... 4 Files, sharing, and OneDrive for Business ............................................................................. 5 Create a group ...................................................................................................................... 6 Subscribing to a group .......................................................................................................... 7 Group naming policies .......................................................................................................... 7 Office Group Limitation ........................................................................................................ 8 Reference .............................................................................................................................. 8

What is an Office 365 group? People are social. Some say it’s our most defining characteristic. We work and play in groups so we can talk, listen, collaborate, and accomplish something. We quickly get together to get stuff done or organize into a team or association. Whatever the reason, people in a group know and trust each other, chat regularly, and often create reports and files. You can use an Office 365 group to make this all happen a lot more productively. Collaborating with colleagues can be challenging. When teams are working on a project together, there can be a lot to keep track of. Emails and meetings in Outlook, conversations and calls in Skype for Business and documents to store and share in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. Office 365 groups enables teams to come together and get work done, by establishing a single hub (managed in Azure active directory), and a single set of permissions across all these Office 365 apps, so teams can simplify collaboration and increase productivity. Office 365 groups also allows collaboration in OneNote, Power BI and Dynamics CRM. When a user joins the group, they immediately gain access to all of the work of the team and project. Check out the video below to see how one team uses Office 365 groups and read this topic to learn more about Office 365 groups.

Collaborating in Office 365 Groups We’re also working on more innovations for Office 365 groups. They’ll soon be working in Office Planner, Delve and Yammer.

Public and private Office 365 groups An Office 365 group can be public or private. A public group is open to everyone. If you just want to see what the group is doing, all the content and conversations are easy to view. But if the group interests you, you can join it and become a member. In most cases, a public group is your preferred alternative. On the other hand, a private group is exclusive and only open to its members. The content and conversations are secure and not viewable by everyone. Choose a private group when you are concerned about security and privacy, such as trade secrets or confidential information. Although anyone can see the name of the private group, information isn't accessible from search, links, or in other ways. Joining a private group requires approval from a group administrator. You can't change a public group into a private group, or a private group into a public group. Note: Although you can't participate in a private group that you aren't a member of, anyone can send email to a private group and even receive replies from that private group.

Group owners and group members There are a few things to call out about group members and owners. 

  

When a group owner leaves your organization or team, all email, conversations, files, and calendar events are saved, so other group members can access the data. As the admin of your organization, you can add a new group owner or promote another owner of the group in the Office 365 admin center or via PowerShell. Check out Manage Group membership in the Office 365 admin center and Use PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups. You should also consider having multiple owners for a group in case there needs to be some management tasks and the group owner isn’t available. A group can't have more than 10 owners. A user can't create more than 250 groups. Groups with more than a 1000 members are supported, but group users may notice that accessing group conversations and the group calendar can take a long time.

Discovering and joining Office 365 groups Before you can join an Office 365 group, you need to find it. Fortunately, groups are open and discoverable by default. To help you build a strong social network, take some time to discover existing groups and their members in your organization. If you know members of a group, their interests often coincide with yours. Finding groups first also avoids duplication of effort. Why create a group if one with the same purpose already exists? When you find a group that interests you, explore its membership, conversations, and files. Then decide whether to join the group and become an active participant. Check out Find, join, or leave a group.

PolyU Email Service - Office Group User Guide v1.0

3/8

Conversations and e-mail To get things started and keep things going, an important part of any group is communication. A group has its own mailbox so all group emails are easy to locate and manage. In Outlook Web App, you can also have a conversation with group members by posting and replying to short messages. The entire history of conversations are preserved, helping new members get up to speed quickly. Conversations are sorted by date from oldest to newest, you can quickly catch up with new conversation messages which are marked with a blue tab and even add attachments. Occasionally, you might want to send an email message to the group, to ensure everyone gets the message right away. When you create the message, just type the group name on the To line.

Group calendar A dedicated group calendar helps all members coordinate their schedules. Everyone in the group automatically sees meeting invites and other events. If you belong to more than one group, it’s easy to view each group calendar side-by-side. Events that you create in the group calendar are automatically added and synchronized with your personal calendar. For events that other members create, you can add the event from the group calendar to your personal calendar, and the event automatically synchronizes with your personal calendar. Finally, you can overlay your personal calendar with a group calendar, to see how schedules align.

PolyU Email Service - Office Group User Guide v1.0

4/8

Files, sharing, and OneDrive for Business Sharing content, such as files and folders, is a hallmark of group collaboration. Shared content can live elsewhere in Office 365, but OneDrive for Business makes it convenient to view and edit files regardless of the actual location. Sharing content also helps unlock useful information hidden in mailboxes and personal folders. A group’s One Drive for Business page is the primary place for group files, but you can access other shared and followed documents that you may need throughout the day to further collaborate with your group.

Note: When you try to add a folder, if you get the error message, Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object, contact your site admin. Before you can add folders to your group files, your admin must configure SharePoint to prevent users from running custom scripts on personal sites. For more information, see Turn scripting capabilities on and off.

PolyU Email Service - Office Group User Guide v1.0

5/8

Create a group Notes: The one who create the Group become the Group Owner of it, by default. He/She can add other group owners, add/delete group members, change name of Group, and even delete the group. Steps on Outlook on the Web 1

Login to web version of Staff Email: http://www.outlook.com/polyu.edu.hk

2

In the navigation pane, next to Groups, select the Create button. (If you don't see the Create button, hover your mouse over the navigation pane.

3

In Choose a name, enter a group name that briefly captures the spirit of the group.

4

To assign an abbreviated name to your group which will be part of the group URL, in the Group ID box click Edit . If you see "not available," the group ID is already in use. Try something different. Note that once you choose a group ID, it cannot be changed.

5

In Add a description, enter a detailed description of the group to help others understand its purpose. This description will be included in the welcome email when others join the group.

6

In Privacy, do one of the following:  To create a group in which anyone within your organization can view its content and become a member, select Public.  To create a group in which membership requires approval by a group owner and only members can view group content, select Private. Note: This Privacy setting cannot be changed once the group is created. It is necessary to delete the group and recreate it, if needed.

7

To enable subscribed members to receive email and calendar event notifications in both their group inbox and personal inbox, select Subscribe members so they receive group conversations in their inbox. This is recommended when members belong to multiple groups because it means they can see all group notifications in one place without having to visit each group mailbox in order to stay current with group activity.

8

Select Create.

PolyU Email Service - Office Group User Guide v1.0

6/8

Example to show how Office Group as presented in Outlook 2016

Subscribing to a group When you subscribe to a group, you are requesting that conversations or events from the group be sent to your inbox. If you prefer to use Outlook instead of Outlook Web App, it’s a great idea to enable this feature, because it ensures that all members receive group email messages and calendar events in Outlook in a timely way so they can stay up-to-date on group activity. You can also reply to the conversations from Outlook, and the replies are immediately posted to the group conversation. Subscribing to a group is also helpful when you are actively working in different groups and related projects, and want to stay on the top of each conversation and calendar event from your inbox. Subscribing is not enabled by default. You can enable subscribing for the group when you first create the group. After creating a group, you can also enable subscribing when adding a new member. Finally, each individual can enable or disable subscribing to suit their individual preferences. If you think you are getting too much information from the group in your inbox, you can always unsubscribe from the group to reduce the information flow. The conversations are still available in the group, so you can revisit them from time-to-time to catch up on past conversations. There is a convenient unsubscribe link at the bottom of all group email messages.

Group naming policies Group naming policies allows you to control how group names and email aliases appear in your organizations directory, and how they appear to users. We are required a specific prefix be added to the name for a distribution group when it's created. In order to separate between Office Group and Distribution Group. Groups created by users must use the following naming format: Grp__ where is a descriptive name provided by the colleague who creates the group. For example,  

Group Name: Workshop Department Code: ITS

PolyU Email Service - Office Group User Guide v1.0

7/8



The name of the Office Group created: Grp_ITS_Workshop

Office Group Limitation • • • • •

A Group can only have maximum of 10 owners Group type (Private or Public) cannot be changed after creation Recovered Deleted Items /Deleted Items is not available to Group mailbox There will be storage quota to be applied to each Group. It will be confirmed later. The Group will be expired and removed from the system after inactive for 6 months

Reference Chapter 7, Office 365 for Exchange Professional – by Tony Redmond https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-about-Office-365-groups-b565caa1-5c40-40ef-991560fdb2d97fa2?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

PolyU Email Service - Office Group User Guide v1.0

8/8