Microsoft truly worked its ass off in making its Office apps perfect to work in a collaboration with your team and others. Therefore, features are like OneDrive integration and Office 365 groups are very important. If you want to know how to effective use Office 365 groups with your team, this article is for you.
What is Office 365 Groups?
It’s a set of features that were designed to help you work along with other people, like with your office team on a single project or whatever. It simply lets you do whatever you do with Office apps like Word, Outlook, or PowerPoint only now with others as well. They can edit the same document you are working on, assign calendars to groups, shared OneNote for sharing ideas, and so on.
It is in a lot of way similar to distribution lists, a group of contacts, but it is not exactly the same thing. Office 365 is a much refined and more sophisticated way to collaborate with others.
You can also add your contacts groups to Office 365 groups.
Office 365 groups is most relevant for Outlook 2016 users. If you use Outlook 2016 in Windows or Mac as your email client, you will notice that creating a group for facilitating team-work will be benefited enormously from Office 365 groups.
Some of the benefits you’ll get:
- You can create a shared inbox and every memeber in the group will have the access to the messages and the conversations.
- You can create a shared calendar so everyone in the group gets the same reminders for upcoming events. Anyone can also create a new event reminder and everyone else can see those reminders.
- A shared onenote can be created for sharing ideas, noting down points, or saving information that anyone can add to, or edit, or even delete.
The great thing about Office 365 groups is that you don’t have to set each of these shared resources manually. After you create a group, everything will set for you automatically. Outlook will automatically assign the permissions to the members of your groups. There are settings that you can change to have better control and flexibility.
How to use Outlook 365 Groups?
To create a group in Outlook 365:
- On the ‘Home’ tab, click ‘New Group’
- Set the name of the group, Group ID, and Privacy settings
- Set if you want the emails to be sent to each individual member’s inbox or want them to visit the group’s inbox to view the emails.
- Add members. You can also add a distribution list just by typing the name of the list.
There are lot more freedom over what you can do with the groups. For example – you can also add a guest and assign the permissions as you see fit. The guest can access the conversations, the calendar entries, the group files, and anything else that was given access to.
Groups are also not limited to the desktop version of Outlook. Users can even access groups or create one in Outlook webmail. This gives them a lot of freedom in accessing the group’s content from anywhere regardless of the fact that they don’t have their computer with them.
In the coming time, we’ll be sharing more about Outlook and Office 365 groups. We’ll be going in details about some of the specific resources you can share and collaborate with others.