Foundational SharePoint Concepts

0:00There are primarily two different types of SharePoint sites that we can create, a communication site and a team site. But to be fair, these site types could be used in all sorts of different ways, which might make you think that there should be other types of site on this list too, such as, I dunno, a community site or a new site. But what we tend to see is that we simply have these two types of site, which then get customized to turn it into whatever you need it to be for the scenario that you have in mind. But anyway, we'll start off with a communication site.

0:32And in a nutshell, these types of sites, these communication sites, are designed to, as Microsoft says, inform and engage. And basically this simply could be your company intranet. It's where you would go to see company news or to get links to where you need to go to submit expenses or to request time off or to find out the company's policy on working from home, you know the kind of thing. But a distinguishing feature about these communication sites is that we expect a lot of visitors, but only a few editors.

1:05So we are expecting pretty much every single person in the organization to visit it at some point, aren't we? But we do not expect all of those people to be able to edit the site. So no, we expect only a handful of people to actually have edit rights. Perhaps a couple of folks in the HR department and maybe a couple in IT or whoever the individuals are who are responsible for the content on the intranet. But anyway, let's look at a quick example of a communication site. And you can see that I'm in the Microsoft 365 portal here. And don't worry, once we do start digging in deep into SharePoint, I will hide the tabs at the top here to give ourselves a bit more room on the screen.

1:40But if I just go into SharePoint from here, and I'm just gonna dive into the landing. So this is the example intranet from Microsoft's demo environment. And you can see straight away that it does look quite corporate, doesn't it? It looks like it has been designed with a view to engaging employees. We've got various links across the top here, which pop out to lots of sub-pages for information and whatnot. And as I scroll through, you can see that there's various feeds for news and events and whatnot. So yes, very much an intranet type of look and feel.

2:12And you will also notice that if you were to sort of look around the other options here, I do not have the ability to edit this site because I am a mere user. I'm not an editor or anybody important to do this intranet, so I can't make changes to this site, which is what you would expect for an intranet. And in fact, if I do go into settings and look at site permissions, what you'll see that there are just a handful of site owners who, as you can see, do have full control. And there are again, a handful of site members who have limited control, but the vast majority of people in this particular example are simply site visitors with no control.

2:47They can only view the site content. And that is often what we would expect to see for an intranet for one of these communication sites. And in fact, in the older SharePoint experience, these kinds of sites used to be known as publishing sites. And that kind of makes sense, because you can see that the idea here is that the content is published for other people to consume but not to edit. So yes, with a communication site, we are assuming that there are lots of visitors, but only a few editors, whereas for a team site, we are assuming that all members of the site are publishing content.

3:23That is very much the key characteristic of a team site as opposed to a communication site. This time, we're a group of people, we're all members and we're all collaborating, we're all publishing content, we're sharing stuff. This team site is where we go to get our work done, so we're not just consuming content that somebody else has decided to publish to us, like with a communication site. No, this time we're all jumping in and sharing and we're rolling up our sleeves here and getting the work done. And if I just take you back into SharePoint and show you an example of a team site this time, so let me just go back to the SharePoint start page and go into this U.S. Sales site.

3:59And in fact you can just guess by the name of the site here that this is much more likely to be a team site rather than a communication site. It's where the members of the U.S. Sales team go to get their work done. And in fact, what you're looking at here has hardly been customized at all. As we will see, this is very much how it looks straight out of the box, but you can see that it visually looks different. It's got a different style of navigation. Rather than the navigation bar across the top, like we saw with that intranet example, we've got this navigation down the side, and this is all about having conversations with the team or sharing documents with the team or having a shared notebook.

4:33And there are other things we can add as well, as we will see, but for example, if I click on the shared document library here, then I've got various folders and various documents that I am sharing with members of the team. This is a team working experience this time rather than it being open to the whole company, like we would expect for the intranet example, well this time, we can see at the top right hand corner, there are only seven members of this site. And if I click that, what we get to see is that yes, group membership, there are seven people, there are just a couple of owners, who are the ones with the superpowers.

5:03So there's a generic administrator login there and also James is an owner. Everybody else is a member of the site, but I can still jump in and start sharing content. I can edit these files or I could upload my own. And even if I need to edit the way this team site looks as well, you can see here I do have an edit button available even though I'm just a member of the site and not a site owner in any way because it's got that different emphasis. We're assuming that we're all working together towards a shared goal here. So yes, although we could change these permissions, the expected behavior is that everybody will be able to edit the site and publish content to it.

5:41So yes, as I said, these are the two primary types of SharePoint site. But I do have one more thing to add to this list, because you might hear reference to the idea of a hub site. Now let me explain. Any existing site, although usually admittedly a communication site can become a hub site, and the idea is that other SharePoint sites can then be associated with a hub site. And this is all about organizing related sites, but when you have got sites associated with the hub site, it's the hub that provides shared navigation across the associated sites and a kind of rolled up experience for content and search.

6:21And it's instead of trying to create a fixed hierarchy of SharePoint sites by creating sub-sites because that's not very flexible, they're kind of pretty much permanently attached to the parent site in the hierarchy. Whereas with these hubs, you can change which hub a particular site is associated with. The point being it's then much easier to change your SharePoint structure rather than trying to move those older-style sub-sites around. But this is a diagram that I snipped from the Microsoft documentation on SharePoint hubs. You can see the hubs in orange here.

6:53So I've got three, HR, Sales, and EMEA and you can see that each hub has got a number of SharePoint sites associated with it, either communication sites shown in the green or team sites shown in blue. And as I said, that hub provides us with the shared navigation and whatnot across the sites associated with it. But if our organization changes, then it's gonna be easy to, for example, change this team site here so that it's associated with this hub instead. So as I said, it's much more flexible than trying to manage sub-sites.

7:24But anyway, I have put a link to where I got this in the skill, if you want to learn more about hubs, because I'm not really gonna say too much more about them in this course because hub sites can only be created by global administrators or SharePoint administrators. And we'll hear a little bit more about those different administrator roles in the next video. But for now, let me just show this chalkboard here again, which I think will serve quite well as a summary for this video.

0:00Before we go too much further with actually doing some stuff in SharePoint, I think I'd like us to check what admin role you have, because that's gonna impact what you're able to do in SharePoint when you follow along with me in this course. So when you look at this login here, we are obviously looking at that intranet example page that we saw in the last video. But I need to tell you that I'm logged in as me, my demo account here, and I am just a regular Microsoft 365 user. I am not a Microsoft 365 administrator, but yet when I go to the SharePoint homepage, I still look at the top left-hand corner here, get the opportunity to be able to create a new site.

0:37So what we're using here is pretty much the default permissions whereby ordinary users can create a new site. And you can see here I've got the opportunity to create a new team site or a new communication site, which are the two site types that we talked about in the previous video. So my demo environment is set up pretty much with the default permissions and roles and whatnot, and with a bit of luck, that'll be the same for you. But of course it wouldn't be unusual for an organization to decide that they do not want every user to be able to randomly create new SharePoint sites all over the place.

1:08So if that's the case for you, if you do not have this button up here at the top left-hand corner to create a new site, then there are a couple of things that we need to look at. So you'll need to speak to the folks in your IT department. So what I'm just gonna do is just switch to a different browser experience just here where I'm logged in as James, James Conrad, because he is an administrator in my demo environment. So we're in the Microsoft 365 admin center here, which is admin.microsoft.com. So if you didn't have that create site button, then you're not gonna be able to get to this either.

1:40So this would be the sort of thing that your IT administrator would need to do. So from here over on the left-hand side, I'm going to click on show all and go to the SharePoint admin center. And then if I go to Settings, and then just here, Site creation, what you can see is that within this Microsoft 365 admin center for SharePoint, we have got this checkbox checked that says users can create SharePoint sites. So if you did not have that create site button, it might be because that this box has been unchecked.

2:12So you may choose to speak to your IT folks about getting that checked again. But if they are not comfortable doing that because they don't want everybody to merrily create sites, as I've just said, then a reasonable compromise might be that they may well be happy to assign you the role of a SharePoint administrator, which means that you then have superpowers for just the SharePoint part of your Microsoft 365 environment. So if I just close down that particular setting and go back to the general admin center and then up here go into Roles, what you'll see if I look at the different role assignments that we do have a role of SharePoint administrator.

2:48And if I click that, then this will give you a little overview as to what that role actually entails and to whom it's been assigned. So you can see, for example, on the Permissions tab, it's explaining that yes, the SharePoint administrator is gonna be able to do all of these things and create Microsoft 365 groups, to manage membership of sites and whatnot, and you know, modify things, and delete stuff and, you know, do stuff in terms of looking after your SharePoint environment. So if need be, it would be great if you could be assigned the SharePoint administrator role if you're not able to create new sites as a regular end user.

3:20And just as a point of interest in my environment, I have got that role assigned to Lalo. You can see that there. So as we progress through this course, there'll be some things where I'm gonna be showing you the experience from my point of view as a user who does not have SharePoint administrative rights, but I am still able to create a new site and there'll be other things maybe that I might need to dive into Lalo's point of view to show you what potentially extra functionality he gets because he's a SharePoint administrator. But I just thought that was worth pointing out.

3:50So to summarize then, our assumed starting point is that you do not necessarily have any special administrator role, but that your organization has enabled the ability for ordinary users to create new SharePoint sites. And if that facility has been disabled for you for any reason, then as I said, maybe you could suggest that you become a SharePoint administrator to give you some special SharePoint superpowers.

0:00You'll see that I'm starting off in Microsoft Teams. So if you're a Teams user, this will look familiar to you. If not, then maybe this is just gonna be background information because perhaps your organization isn't yet using Teams. But anyway, in this Teams experience, what I'm gonna do is create a brand new team whereby a team is any group of people. It could be a project team, it could be a department. I've got a number of templates to choose from. But no, I'm just gonna create a basic team from scratch. It's going to be a private team because I want to invite specific people. And let's imagine it's gonna be for the Chess Club of our organization.

0:34And obviously, I could put a description in there, but let's just quickly create that. And then, I'm going to get the opportunity to invite some people to this team. So let's add some of our usual suspects, so Joni and James and Lalo and Patti. And what you'll see is that I've got some different roles that I can assign to these people that I'm adding to this team. And by default, it's just adding them as a member. Now because I set up this team, I am an owner. That gives me extra powers and it is useful to assign somebody else as a secondary owner just in case I get run over by a bus.

1:10And it's useful for somebody else to be able to step in and to do some of the administrative tasks with this team. So what I'd like you to take away from this is that I've got a number of members in this team. I'm an owner because I set it up and I have also assigned Joni as an owner, but these other folks here are mere members. So I'm going to add those additional people to this team. That appears to have been done. So if you look down the left hand side, there's my new Chess Club team that I've set up. It's got a General channel, that's where the conversations take place, but I'm going to add another channel as well.

1:42So let's just add a channel. Let me just call it something like Meeting Minutes. There we go. Choose a channel type. Well, I'm just gonna have it as a standard channel and create it. So a channel is basically a topic of conversation within that team and we always have a General channel, but I've added this meeting in its channel. So that obviously is just Teams stuff, which you may or may not be familiar with. But the reason why I really want you to know about this is every time we create a new team, like I have just done here for Chess Club, in the background, a SharePoint team site has been automatically created for us and that becomes most obviously apparent when we start sharing files.

2:24So in this Meeting Minutes channel, you'll see I've got a Files tab. So that's where we would share files with the team. So let me just quickly upload any old documents. Let me just stick in a file there into that Files tab in the Meeting Minutes channel. And you will also see that across the top here, I've got various tabs in Teams and one of the other default ones 'cause you can add all sorts of things from here. But one of the default ones you can see here is Notes. And basically, that is a shared OneNote notebook and the first time you click it, it takes a moment or two to get itself organized.

2:59But once we've done that, then within the Teams' environment, we do have a shared notebook. So let me just put in, maybe this is minutes from a particular meeting on a particular date, and let me just quickly put in some random texts there. Good, magic, so looking across the top in the Meeting Minutes channel, I've got various posts, which is conversations that we're having in Teams. I've got files that we're sharing in the Meeting Minutes channel and I've got a shared notebook. The other channels, so you'll see here the General channel, that would have its own separate shared files. And I've currently got nothing in the General channel, but while I am in the Files tab here, you will see on this little toolbar that I do get the opportunity to open this up in SharePoint.

3:42Now in your environment, by all means click that 'cause that should work. But for me, because I'm working in an InPrivate browsing window, it gets a bit upset about what account I'm logged in as. So what I'm actually gonna do, rather than choose that link to open in SharePoint, I'm going to generate a link and just copy that, and then manually go to my InPrivate browsing window here to go to that SharePoint site. So let me just paste that in and press Enter. So what you are looking at now, you can see at the top left hand corner, yes, I'm in SharePoint. Yes, I'm in Chess Club.

4:12And straight away, we can see some interesting things have happened. I'm just gonna close that next steps panel over on the right hand side there. But if I click on the document library on the left hand side here, you'll see that as part of the automatic generation of this team site when I created that team in Teams is that for every channel in that team, in our case it was just General and Meeting Minutes, I have got a document folder in my document library ready and waiting for those shared files.

4:43We already saw that in the General channel, we didn't have any shared files. But in the Meeting Minutes channel, I did drag, didn't I? Just a random document from my documents folder, which was that turtle file. So that's exactly the same there. If I go back to the Meeting Minutes channel here and back to Files, then that's exactly the same. I've got that document there, and this will work both ways. So if within the SharePoint site, if I were to add an extra file just here, in fact, let's do it. So let's just add another document. Let's just stick that up there.

5:14So I'm doing that through the SharePoint interface. So now if I go back to Teams and just click away and click back to force that to refresh, then sure enough, that document shows there. So this becomes really quite interesting if your organization does use Teams because the team sites are using SharePoint in the background to manage all of those shared documents. And do you remember that shared notebook that I started using in the Teams environment? So it was here, wasn't it? The Meeting Minutes, I started writing some notes, didn't I? Imagining that I'm taking notes from a meeting while back in that SharePoint site, look at the left hand side.

5:48I've got a notebook link and notice what happens when I do click that. It's actually going to load OneNote online. So this is the Chess Club notebook. You can see that at the top there and you can see that same little bit of nonsense that I typed in while I was in Microsoft Teams on that tab. But let me just click the back button there to go back to that Chess Club site. But I also wanted to mention the membership to you. So if I go within SharePoint to this area here where it shows me there are five members, you will see unsurprisingly the exact same five members that we would expect from the team that we set up in Microsoft Teams.

6:29And you will remember that I said because I set up that team in Teams, I'm an owner and we also assigned Joni as a secondary owner in case I get run over by a bus. And then, these other people are members. So the membership is completely consistent between Teams and the underlying SharePoint team site. And in fact, just to prove the point, if I were to add another member, so let's add Lee. So another internal person here and yes, he's a member, that's fine, let's just save that. So Lee has now been added as a member and let's promote Patti to being another owner, and the changes that I have made to the group membership here should be reflected back in the Teams membership.

7:09So from within the Chess Club, just for a bit of variety, I'm actually going to get back to that team rather than going down to the Teams app. I'm going to use this little button just here that's indicating that this has got an associated Teams channel. So if I click that and I shall stay in the web app this time just for a bit of variety, so if I just choose to stay in the web app to have a look at that team in Microsoft Teams, here's our Chess Club team, let's click on Manage team. And I should see the same changes to the membership that we made through SharePoint. So if I expand the guests here, we can see that Lee has been added.

7:44I'm not sure that we can see yet that Patti has been made an owner. Let's just check that I did do that properly. So the six members there, so Patti should be an owner. Let's just go back in here and refresh that and see if we can get that to update to show that Patti is an additional owner. Yeah, there we go. So Patti is shown there as an owner. But let me just go back to SharePoint for a second because that does lead us to consider, oops, it was a Chess Club, I was after, there we are. It does lead us to consider a little bit about how these different roles are set up with regards to what owners can do and what members can do.

8:15And I do want to talk again about permissions another time when we talk about sharing files and whatnot in a different skill. But just briefly as we saw, I can choose for people either to be an owner or a member. But if we go into the site permissions, let me show you a little bit about what that actually means. So here in site's permissions, this is where we can see that site owners get full control. Site members get limited control. Site visitors get no control. So if I click the drop down there, then sure, the owners that I had assigned which was me and Joni and Patti have full control, et cetera.

8:50But if I go into the advanced permission settings down here, and this looks a bit ugly because this is taken from the older SharePoint interface, but if I click just here on permission levels, this is where I can start to understand what the different levels are and what specifically that means people with those permission levels can do. So we know that the team members, so if I go back to this here, the team members, they had edit rights and I can look here to see that if somebody has got edit rights, then this is what they are able to do.

9:25I can start drilling down into the nitty gritty of exactly what that means they can and can't do. And as you can see, I could actually change this if I wanted to. So that's a little bit of detail around permissions. I tend to find that most people most of the time are happy to stick with the default there and just decide whether somebody is going to be a an owner or a member. That's often enough, but I thought it was useful to just see where we would go if we wanted to dig a little bit deeper. Let me just point out a couple of other things about this automatically generated SharePoint team site.

9:55So on the left hand side, you will see this Conversations entry. And I'm not gonna lie, this does trouble me a little bit because before I click it, if I just remind you that in Microsoft Teams, we have conversations in Teams, don't we? So for example, in our Chess Club team, on the General channel, I could start a new conversation there or I think, yes, I'd already put a new post there in the Meeting Minutes channel. So this is what I would call a conversation and I dunno about you, when I click this Conversations tab here in the SharePoint site, I'm expecting to see those Teams conversations.

10:28But no, it's actually taking us to a shared group mailbox, and this is Outlook online you're looking at here. And we'll refer back to this when we look at the next video. So just bear that in mind. That may or may not do what you expect, but I think there is inevitably going to be some overlap between the use of SharePoint and the use of Microsoft Teams. And it can get confusing I think for members to know what they should post where. So for example, on the homepage of the SharePoint site, you know I've got the ability to add a newsfeed or quick links. So should I post interesting news items and links here on the SharePoint team site homepage or should I be posting them into a conversation within Teams?

11:05It is confusing. You're gonna need to provide guidance to the team as to how you want these to be used. But let's say we are using the SharePoint side of things. So I'm just going to quickly add another news item. I'm going to add a news link and I've already got something on my clipboard already just to paste in there. So I'm adding a quick news link to a BBC article here because it's currently very hot here in the UK. So if I just say, yeah, that looks good, I'm going to post that. Then as you might imagine, that's going to pop it into the news web part here and it'd be the same if I were to edit any of these quick links or make any other edits to this page.

11:39And we'll have a deeper dive about editing these pages and other time. So if you are using this, then what is quite nice if you are a Teams-led organization within that Chess Club team in Teams. So let's imagine on the General tab, I think, oh, well I really would like access to that homepage from the associated team site or well we can add extra tabs. So if I click this button here and search for the SharePoint app, it's actually shown me as a default there. This is where I could add content to the Teams channel from existing SharePoint sites.

12:11It could be any SharePoint site or it has assumed that I want to add something from the underlying Chess Club SharePoint team site. That's exactly right. So let's add the homepage. So let's save that and what that will do, it'll give me an extra tab just here alongside the Files and Notes that we already talked about, which is giving me the opportunity to interact with that SharePoint homepage directly from within Microsoft Teams. So I think that does work really nicely. So the key points I want you to take away from this video is that when you create a new team in Microsoft Teams, it generates an underlying SharePoint Teams site, which is where all of those files you share through Teams are stored into a folder with the same name as the channel from Microsoft Teams.

0:00Having seen how nicely integrated Microsoft Teams is with SharePoint, what I'd like to cover in this video is kind of the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and that's a Microsoft 365 Group. Now, there is a lot of confusion around how all of this works together, and I wouldn't normally trouble a regular end user with the detail that we're about to talk about in this video, but as a power user, there is quite an important concept to understand with regards to the Microsoft 365 group, and in order to explain it to you, I'm going to take you on a little trip down memory lane with a little bit of a history lesson, because there are in fact lots of different types of groups in our Microsoft environment.

0:39And firstly on my list here, I've got the idea of a distribution list. And I bet you already know what this is. It is basically a list of email addresses, but distinctly, it's a list that's been created by your organization. So I'm sure that you've got distribution lists in your email environment. You know, it might be something like sales@yourcompany.com or marketingteam@yourcompany.com. So that's a distribution list, which means you can easily send an email to all of the people on that distribution list at the same time.

1:10So hopefully no great surprises so far, but let me just pop in to my email environment. Gosh, I've got a lot of windows open here. So I've just logged into Outlook online through my demo environment. So yes, if I want to send a new email and I know that we've got a distribution list called Sales Team or something, then I can just start typing the name of that distribution list. I can pick it from the suggestions there, and that's a collection of all of the email addresses that have been put onto that distribution list by my organization. If I want to, I can expand that out to see all of the individual members, and then I could remove somebody if I needed to.

1:44Yeah, that's how I would use a distribution list. So I did make the distinction that a distribution list is set up by your organization, and you might be saying to me, "Oh, well I'm sure I can create distribution lists myself as well." And indeed, in years gone by, we would have called the user-created groups of email addresses distribution lists. But now in more recent iterations of Outlook, we call those contact lists in order to distinguish them from the ones that have been set up for your organization like the sales team.

2:16So here in Outlook, if I take myself down the left hand side into the people part of Outlook, you will see down the left hand side, yes, I've got my contacts, which is basically, you know, my address book of all of the people I've added, but I've also got here contact lists, and that's gonna be my own personal distribution lists, as it were. So you can say, I've already got one here for Yoga Class. So if I want to set up a contact list, so click the dropdown just here, let's create a new contact list. So this is just gonna be for me. So let's imagine there are a few parents in the organization that I work for who all have kids at the same school as me, so we have a little bit of a a school run thing going on where we email each other about who's gonna do the pickup that day or whatever.

2:58Just a silly example, but let me add a few characters from my demo organization. So I should just add the usual culprits, so Joni, and James, and Lalo. I could add a description if I wanted to, if I had lots of contact lists and I wanted to be able to distinguish between them, but obviously not required for this example. But you can see the idea. I've now got a new group of email addresses. We call it a contact list with those particular people. So the next time I want to send an email to those particular people about the school run, well, let's just disregard that example one to the sales team, and create a new email, but this time address it to the, whoops, to the school run.

3:36Then as you might expect, that pops up. And if I want to, as with the distribution list, I can expand that contact list to see the individual people, and if required, remove someone. So distribution lists and contact lists have been around for a long time. So let me just go back to that slide. So yes, the distribution list is created by your organization, whereas a contact list is a list of email addresses that works very much in the same way, but it was created by you. It's just for you personally.

4:06But if you think about it, a simple group of email addresses, while that might still have a place in the way that we collaborate today, that's pretty old-fashioned, isn't it? Because it simply allows us to send an email to everybody. And in reality, if we do have a group of people that we want to send an email to, we probably wanna do other stuff as well, such as share files, share calendars, share resources. I think you can see where we're going with this. So the evolution of the concept of a list of email addresses, whether it's a distribution list or a contact list, is a Microsoft 365 Group.

4:41And we used to call these Office 365 Groups. They have been around for really quite a long time, and in my experience, they didn't really catch on in the early days. And I will show you why, because we tended to use them through the Outlook interface. And in my opinion, it was a bit ugly and a bit awkward. And a bit of a spoiler alert here, the Microsoft 365 Group has evolved into the SharePoint and the Teams experience that we have today. But bear with me as I take you through the history lesson, because I need you to understand that some users will be confused if they have used groups before, if they have used distribution lists or contact lists before, we need to understand how they all fit together.

5:19So a Microsoft 365 Group is a set of people with a collection of shared resources. And as I said, traditionally we'd have handled this within a Microsoft Outlook environment. So let me just take myself to Outlook on the web. And what you'll see, I'm looking in my inbox now, let me just disregard this message I had started to send to the school run contact list or whatever it was. But looking in my inbox here, you can see yes, that's my regular inbox where my emails will arrive. But down towards the bottom I've got these groups.

5:49So these are Microsoft 365 groups or Office 365 groups, and I've got a number of groups here which don't seem to at first glance bear much relation to my SharePoint or my Teams experience. But don't worry, it'll all come together. So if as an end user, I think to myself, "Ooh, I'm going to create a new contact list for, I dunno, the health and safety committee that I'm setting up." Well, a contact list, as we saw, is simply a collection of email addresses, whereas a group is a collection of shared resources. So maybe if I think to myself, rather than setting up a contact list for that health and safety committee, because I want to share files with them and maybe share a calendar with them, actually a group would be a better idea.

6:30So down here I've got a few existing groups that I was playing with, but let's create a new group and let's call it the Health and Safety, whoops, Committee. Two M's, two T's, two E's. So what that will do, it will create an email address for that group, very much like a distribution list or a contact list. I can have a description of the group. Let's go ahead and create that group. I can then add some members to the group, just like a distribution list or a contact list. And again, I'm just gonna add some of the usual culprits from my demo environment.

7:03So James and Joni and Patti and Lynne. There we go. I'm gonna add those members to this group. You will now see down the left hand side, I've got that new entry there in the groups part of my inbox. There we go, the Health and Safety committee. And just like a distribution list or a contact list, I can send an email to that group. So when I click that, it's gonna send it to the Health and Safety Committee. I can double click here to remind myself who the members of that group actually are if I need to.

7:34Oh, and also while we're here, just notice that the default behavior was when I set up that group is that everybody, all of these members here will be following this group in their inbox, and we'll see what that means in a second. So if I were to send an email to this group, so let's just add a quick test email here to the group. And again, I just, you know, put a bit of nonsense in here. If I send that email to the group, so let's click that and send it. What it will do, it will give us a new entry in the Health and Safety Committee group inbox.

8:06So down here can you see, I've got a group inbox, which has appeared just there. But also because there was that option checked that people are following this in their inbox, all of the members of that group will also see that email appearing in their inbox because they are following in their inbox. If you want to unfollow a group so you don't get the emails duplicated in your own inbox, if you'd rather, you know, choose to go to the group inbox to have a look rather than having those emails duplicated in your inbox, then look down the left hand side in the people part of Outlook.

8:39You'll see I've got a Groups section just here. I can look at groups that I'm a member of, and I can say, "Hmm, that particular group, looks like I'm following it in the inbox. I don't want to. I'm going to turn that off." Which would mean next time I wanted to see what the conversation was going on in the Design group, I would go to my inbox and I would actually choose to go to the Design inbox just there and have a look when I wanted to. And I dunno about you, are you already losing the will here? Do you see what I mean? I think using this sort of group experience in Outlook, while it was quite useful to have this idea of a group inbox, it's not a great user experience.

9:19And over the years, I mean maybe, oh, I can't really remember the timeframe here, but maybe, I dunno, 10 years ago, more, probably, I can remember trying to train users how to use these groups within Outlook, and they didn't really like them. They didn't catch on. The only people that did persevere with them were the people that like to use this functionality here. Because look, when you create a group in Outlook, like we've done, we've got group files and we've also got a group calendar. So where's that group that we created?

9:49There we go, health and Safety Committee. So that was the brand new group that we created. If I want to share files with that group, then I do have group files and I can just upload files here so that anybody in that group can just have a look at those files. Or let me just go back to the Health and Safety Committee entry here in Outlook. I can even look at a group calendar. And again, this is really useful, because it means that I can overlay that group calendar with my own calendar. Look at the left hand side here. I could switch off my calendar and just see the Health and Safety Committee group calendar and you know, put in various events for the Health and Safety Committee and choose to sit with or without my own calendar there.

10:24So it was a way that end users could work with group calendars and group inboxes from within Outlook. But as I say, didn't really catch on. I think the interface is a little bit ugly. But look, there's more. Because we already know that the sorts of things that I've been trying to do here in my demo with a group is exactly what SharePoint and Microsoft Teams is very, very good at. So with this Health and Safety Committee group that I set up in Outlook, if I click the More button just here because yeah, files and calendar, great, but look, we also have a site.

10:57And if you've got especially observant eyes, you'll recognize that as the SharePoint symbol. So if I click that, then yes, a SharePoint team site has been automatically created when I created that group in Outlook as an end user. And this is exactly the sort of thing that you've already seen when we've briefly dived into team sites. So this does make a lot more sense. I think this is much more user-friendly when it comes to sharing updates and links, and to look down the left hand side, documents in the document library and whatnot.

11:27And do you remember, right at the beginning of this skill, I pointed out this Conversations button here and I said, "Well, this takes us to a shared inbox, which we'll come back to another time." Well this is our moment, because of course that takes us to that Health and Safety Committee shared inbox that we had already experienced in Outlook. So let me just get rid of that. So that's where that all comes in. So I would like to suggest if your organization has been dabbling in trying to use groups in Outlook, I would suggest skip that and just create a SharePoint team site and just use the SharePoint experience instead.

12:04If your organization has already got active groups that people have been using historically over the years that were set up in Outlook and use within Outlook, then hopefully that usage will evolve into using the associated SharePoint site. And also notice down the left hand side here, you can add Microsoft Teams to this group. So if you actually think that what we really need is a Teams experience for the Health and Safety Committee, then sure, you can add Microsoft Teams. Now, I am not going to add Microsoft Teams to this Health and Safety Committee group.

12:35Remember that for the next video. But moving forward, if somebody wants to create a new collaborative group experience, they don't have to create the group within Outlook the way I did it. You may as well directly from within SharePoint, create a new site for a team, pick your template, give it a name. So let's do a different example this time. Let's imagine that this is all about the office move. That's a good example of a team site. Let's add some members. So basically I am creating a group here.

13:06I'm creating a Microsoft 365 group. So the concept of a Microsoft 365 group still exists. It's the underlying Microsoft service that's managing the membership. But I've skipped the painful bit of doing it through Outlook. We don't need that bit anymore. We can do it all directly from within SharePoint. So I have created a new group with those seven members, and we've talked about owner and member rights before. If I particularly do want to work with a shared inbox, and as we know that Conversations button will lead us to a shared inbox within Outlook if we want to.

13:39But I think it's gonna make much more sense to have those conversations within Microsoft Teams instead. So I didn't do it for the Health and Safety Committee, but I am gonna do it for this Office Move group. So I'm going to add Microsoft Teams. So it's gonna be using that same underlying service, the Microsoft 365 group. So let's add Teams. So let's go to the Microsoft Teams client. And what we should see, there we go, there's the Office Move group available in Microsoft Teams for us to carry on collaborating.

14:09If I had added Teams to that Health and Safety Committee group, then that too would've appeared here. So let me go back to our slide. So a Microsoft 365 Group is a Microsoft 365 service, which handles the membership of other technologies such as SharePoint and Teams. And it's basically a set of people with a collection of shared resources such as shared files and shared calendars and shared notebooks. It's pretty horrible to use in the Outlook interface, but it is still the underlying membership service of SharePoint and Teams.

14:42So you will still hear about the idea of these groups. But just finally, to complete this discussion, I just wanted to add on the list here a Security Group. 'Cause it is confusing. We've got all of these different types of groups. A Security Group isn't really that interesting for our discussion today. But just be aware that that is used to manage access to resources. Not really in scope for our SharePoint conversation, but just be aware that that's yet another type of group.

0:00I know I said that this course is not a full-blown SharePoint administrator course, but I do want to just briefly show you what the admin center looks like, just to give you a feel for the kind of information available and to give you a bit of confidence if you are thinking of becoming a SharePoint administrator. And don't worry if you're not able to follow along with this video, because, of course, you might not have administrator access. You can just treat this as background information. But anyway, you can see that I'm logged in as Lalo. And you might remember, a few videos ago, I did mention that Lalo happens to be a SharePoint administrator.

0:32So hold that thought. We're gonna see what extra superpowers that gives Lalo in a second. But at the end of the last video, if you remember, we had created two different SharePoint team sites. We created, if you recall, the OfficeMove site through creating a brand new SharePoint site. And we did connect it to Microsoft Teams, if you remember. And we had that other one, the H&S Committee site, which was actually generated through creating a new group through Outlook. And we chose not to connect that to Teams, if you remember, and you can see I don't have that little Teams symbol there.

1:02So that's kind of the story so far. But now, as Lalo, what we're gonna do is back on his homepage. He is going to go into the admin center. And because he's got the administrator role for SharePoint only, he is going to get a subset of the settings that he can manage. So you'll see, first of all, as Lalo, we are in the Microsoft 365 admin center, which is the general kind of umbrella admin center for Microsoft 365. But because he only has access to the SharePoint side of things and the groups side of things, he will not get full edit capability of everything that goes on in this umbrella admin center.

1:40So for example, he can see a list of users, but he's not able to start meddling with users and delete them and change roles and whatnot. So if he goes into a user here and chooses to manage roles for that particular user, it says, oh, sorry, Lalo, you don't have permission to do that. You can look, but you can't touch. So he has a subset of administrator tasks that he can do. But what is interesting for Lalo as a SharePoint administrator, he can look at the teams and the groups. So if we go into Active teams and groups, this is where we can see, look, all of our Teams and Microsoft 365 groups.

2:14And if I scroll down, you can see, oh yes, there we go. There's the H&S Committee. And if you look across at the information we've got here, I can see in this column that the H&S Committee does not have Teams connected. And that's absolutely in keeping with what we already know, whereas the OfficeMove one down here does have Teams connected. So he gets that view of this information. You will also notice across the top here that we've got these different group types that we talked about in the last video. So yes, Lalo can look at the distribution lists that the organization has set up.

2:45And I think it was this Sales Team one, wasn't it, that we tried out in the last video. So yeah, he can look at that. But again, he can't actually meddle with it. But note that if he did need to make changes to the Sales Team, he would need to be an exchange administrator. Now, I'm gonna come back to this later because let's imagine this scenario that somebody many years ago who'd created this Sales Team distribution list, because back in the old days, as we know, distribution lists were very much the way to go. But now, somebody says, look, can we upgrade this distribution list for the Sales Team to a Microsoft 365 group?

3:19Well, we can do that, but we have to be an exchange administrator to be able to make changes to this group. And as we know, Lalo is only a SharePoint administrator, so he can't do that. So I'm gonna come back to that at the end. So hold that thought. But anyway, because Lalo is a SharePoint administrator, he can see a bit more SharePoint information. And down the left-hand side, if he clicks Show all, this is where he gets to see the other admin centers that he has access to. And that's not a very long list for Lalo because he's just able to look at SharePoint. So I'm gonna click SharePoint down the bottom there, and this will give him a bit more information about the SharePoint sites, as you might imagine, and the settings and the policies and whatnot.

3:56So if you do have access to this, then feel free to have a little browse. But if I go back into that list of sites within the SharePoint admin center, it's a similar view that we saw before, but I've got a bit more information available. So for example, let's go to that H&S Committee group again. Yes, we can see that it's not connected to Teams. But if I just scroll sideways, you get to see the type of site it is, when it was created, the number of views and visits and whatnot. I mean, this is just a demo environment, so it's not gonna be desperately exciting.

4:27But also notice that when you do have a site selected, you get the opportunity to associate it with a hub. Or let's imagine, actually, I want to make this site a hub site. So again, I can actually register individual sites as hub sites, and then associate other sites with a hub. So you'll recall that we briefly mentioned the idea of a hub site right at the beginning of this skill. But also notice that if somebody accidentally deletes a SharePoint site, so if a site owner does delete a site, then I am pleased to report that Lalo can save the day and recover it if the site was deleted in error.

5:02So look at the left-hand side. Yes, we've got active sites, but we've also got deleted sites. So what Lalo will be able to do is to choose a deleted site, and then restore it or permanently delete it. But you'll notice that they're only held for a short amount of time. So they're not available forever for restoring, but that's a useful superpower that Lalo has as a SharePoint administrator. But just to finish up, I mentioned that Sales Team distribution list that perhaps we might consider upgrading to a Microsoft group so that it's not just a list of email addresses, but it's got shared resources as well.

5:38And Lalo couldn't do that as a mere SharePoint administrator. So I'm just gonna switch to this other window where I'm logged in as James, who is a general Microsoft 365 global administrator, which means that he has access to the Exchange admin center. So look at all of these different admin centers that James has access to including Exchange. So within Exchange, yet again, we can see that same list of groups. If I go to the Distribution list and click Sales Team this time, because James is an administrator and because he does have access to Exchange administrative tasks, then he can start doing whatever he needs to do with this, including look at this Change the group type.

6:23And what this would do if he chose this option, it would send an upgrade request to that list owner who would then click the appropriate link in the email that they get as part of that request. And that would then upgrade the Sales Team distribution list to a Microsoft 365 group which, in turn, would then facilitate the creation of a team site and a Microsoft Teams experience. But we can only upgrade a distribution list to a Microsoft 365 group within the Exchange admin center.

6:54It's a question that I do get asked every now and again.

0:00Scenario number one, a coworker insists that your department can either have a SharePoint site or use Microsoft Teams, but not both. What are you gonna reply? Well, first of all, it is absolutely technically possible to have both a SharePoint team site and a Microsoft Teams team both based on the same underlying Microsoft 365 group. So technically, there are no restrictions. You know, it's not a case of having to choose one or the other. But I do concede from an end user usability point of view, we might need to provide a bit of guidance as to when we use one and when we use the other.

0:33So when we talked about the integration between SharePoint and Teams, you might remember that we've got here this chess club team within Microsoft Teams and also this chess club SharePoint site, both based on the same underlying Microsoft 365 group to manage the group membership. And what we did, because we had made a few modifications and added some content to the homepage of the SharePoint site, well, within the Microsoft Team, based on that same group, well, we added an extra tab, didn't we, to be able to bring in that SharePoint content within Microsoft Teams.

1:06So that really might be the best of both worlds. Scenario number two is where your manager, who is new to your organization, says to you that in a previous job, she used Office 365 groups through the Outlook client and found it useful to be able to email the group inbox. So what might you reply as an alternative approach? And when we talked about groups, we started to understand that the technology has evolved quite a lot since we first saw Office 365 groups and the idea of a shared mailbox. So while we can still do that, so if your manager is still desperate to have that same sort of environment and yep, sure enough, here we are in Outlook, we can have a group inbox, probably better is to start to introduce her to the SharePoint side of things.

1:50So there will be an associated SharePoint team site with that Office 365 group or the Microsoft 365 group, as we would now call them. And then even better, let's add some real-time chat with Microsoft Teams so that we can have those conversations in Teams rather than using a shared mailbox. And then finally, your organization already uses many SharePoint team sites, and yet your IT department seems to be researching different technology providers for the company intranet. What could you suggest?

2:21Well, that's an easy one. It's really just to remind you that while we will have many SharePoint team sites that pop up throughout your organization, don't forget that SharePoint as a technology will also enable us to create a much more formal, much more restricted kind of broadcast type site, we call those the communication sites, and that would absolutely be a great foundation for your intranet. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.