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Microsoft 365 Groups

Microsoft 365 Groups is a cross-application membership service that enables teams to collaborate effectively and securely by establishing a single team identity and single set of permissions to a collection of Office 365 resources.  

All Microsoft 365 Groups include a SharePoint document library and Team site, a OneNote Notebook, and Planner, so where to choose to start a Group depends on the nature of your team's conversations or communication preferences:

  • If your team is centered around email and calendar and looking to communicate in a more formal and structured manner, then create a Microsoft 365 Group in Outlook.
  • If your team is focused on university-wide communication, broadcasting to large audiences or connecting users across the University, then start your Group in Yammer.
  • If your team is looking to for real-time chat-based collaboration with the same group of people, then your best choice is to create your Group in Microsoft Teams.
  • All Microsoft 365 groups include Planner for task management. If you create a new plan in Planner also creates a new Microsoft 365 group, making it easy for your team to collaborate not only in Planner, but also in OneNote, Outlook, SharePoint, and other apps. The plan email address that Planner creates goes to Outlook Group Conversations. 

Getting Started

Who Can Have It?

  • Groups is part of the Office 365 suite of cloud-based services available to all current students, staff and faculty of Queen's University with an active Queen's NetID@queensu.ca email account
  • Alumni, retired staff and faculty are not eligible to request Groups.  See Membership in the Additional Information section for details on group membership. 

Are There Any Costs?

  • Groups is part of Office 365 service and provided at no cost to eligible users
  • Users are responsible for any personal ISP/cellular arising data charges

How Do I Get It?

How to access an existing a Group?

How Do I Discontinue It?

How Do I Delete a Group?
 

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WARNING: When you delete a Group, Plan or Team, you are permanently deleting the group.
Deletion will remove access to all group conversations, email messages, files, calendars, and any other related information. If you would like to delete a group, please see Delete a Group

What if I Leave Queen's?

  • Please see the Office 365 section of the Service Termination Dates page for details on when service will be discontinued following departure from Queen's
  • Group owners must designate a replacement owner prior to departure. 

Additional Information

Membership

  • Staff, faculty, and current students are eligible to be members of a Microsoft 365 group.  
    Note: If a student is not published (hidden) in the Queen's Global Address List (GAL), they will need to change their publishing options and publish their name and email address in the GAL before they can be added to a group. See Manage Your Publishing Options for more information.
  • People from outside of Queen's with a valid email address can be added as a guest to a group.
  • Additional information on granting access is available on the Microsoft 365 Groups Tutorials

Storage Quota

External Sharing

  • If you're working with vendors, researchers, clients, or customers outside of Queen's University, you might want to give them access to certain areas of your Microsoft 365 group or to specific files and folders, options include:
    • Guest access: The guest access feature gives group owners the ability to include people from outside of Queen's University in a Microsoft 365 group. Once added, guests can collaborate with members and have access to group conversations, files, calendar invitations, and the group notebook.  For more information, including guest capabilities, refer to Microsoft's support article: Guest access in Microsoft 365 groups
    • Anonymous sharing:  Anonymous sharing links are enabled for Microsoft 365 group-connected sites. Group members can create a link that anyone can use to access (view-only) a document or folder, even if they're not logged in to Office 365. For more information on sharing links, refer to Microsoft's support article: Sharing files and folders

Supported Platforms

  • Groups is designed to work with Outlook on the web (OWA), Outlook 2016 (Click-to-Run) and on mobile devices (see Mobile App availability). 

Supported Browsers

  • Groups is designed to work with the current or immediately previous versions of Internet Explorer or Firefox, or the latest version of Chrome. For more information, see Microsoft 365 system requirements

Mobile App availability

Office 365 Connectors

  • This feature is available for use with Queen's Microsoft 365 Groups

Limits

  • Owners per group: 100
  • Groups a user can create: 250
  • Members per group: More than 1000. Only 1000 users can access Group conversations concurrently.  Likewise, users may notice delays when accessing the calendar and conversations in large groups
  • Number of Groups a user can be a member of: 1000
  • SharePoint file storage: 10 GB.  
  • Group mailbox size: 50 GB

Accessibility

  • Office 365 provides features that are accessible and usable for people who have special needs or disabilities.  For more information, visit: Microsoft's Accessibility in Microsoft 365
  • The Queen's Accessibility Hub is a central online resource for accessibility at Queen's and has information and developed a series of "How-to Guides" to assist faculty, staff, and students create an accessible learning environment across the university

Availability

Please refer to the Microsoft Office 365 service page for details on service availability.

Service Level Objective

Please see the links below for Service Level Objectives:

Governing Policies

Users of this service are governed by the following policies, failure to comply may result, at a minimum, with suspension of service:

Users of this service should review the Microsoft 365 Group Usage Guidelines before getting started

Help & Support

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Or, contact the IT Support Centre by calling 613.533.6666 during regular business hours or by filling out the Online Help Form

Last Updated: February 14, 2021