Microsoft 365 Groups in Outlook offer a powerful solution for communication and collaboration with people both inside and outside a company. Create a group to share an inbox, calendar, OneDrive, SharePoint site, OneNote notebook, and more. You can also invite guests from outside of your company so they can collaborate using the same resources.
When you create a Microsoft 365 Group, Outlook automatically creates a shared Outlook inbox, shared calendar, and a document library for collaborating on files. You can also Create a Microsoft Team and integrate tasks with Planner in Teams. You don’t have to worry about manually assigning permissions to all those resources because adding members to the group automatically gives them the permissions they need to the tools your group provides.
Microsoft 365 Groups provide members with:
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Shared inbox - Where the conversations you traditionally have in your distribution lists take place. This shared inbox is fully searchable so it creates a living archive of the group's messages. Newcomers to the group can search or scroll back through the history to get up to speed quickly on what's been posted in the group previously. See: Send an email to a Group in Outlook.
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Shared files library - Your group has a SharePoint files library where your users can store, share and collaborate on documents, workbooks, presentations, images or any other kind of file they need to work on. See: Share files with a Group in Outlook.
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Shared calendar - Your group gets a shared calendar to post events related to the group. Each member who has subscribed to the group is automatically invited to events posted to the calendar so those events can also appear on their personal calendars if they wish. See: Use a Group calendar in Outlook to schedule and edit events.
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Shared OneNote notebook - The group automatically has a shared OneNote notebook where group members can collect and collaborate on information. Many groups use the notebook to create a living wiki with frequently asked questions and other resources.
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Guest access - You could add external contacts to distribution groups before, but all they got was email. With groups you can offer guests access to email conversations, files and even the shared OneNote notebook. See: Use Groups in Outlook as a guest.
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Content is discoverable - Groups in Outlook are public by default which means that they are easy for other people in your organization to discover and join or review the materials in the group. If the content of the group is more sensitive you can switch the group to private, which hides the contents from non-members and requires the group owner to approve any requests to join.
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Self-service creation - IT doesn't have to get bogged down by requests from users to create groups. Users can create their own groups as needed. If you want to control which users in your organization can create groups see: Manage who can create Microsoft 365 Groups.
Administration of your groups
Microsoft 365 offers a number of useful tools and capabilities for more easily managing and administering your groups.
Tip: Bookmark Microsoft 365 Groups - common tasks for easy access to administrator info on group creation, delegation, email management, mail flow, restoration, and useful scripts.
Keeping your directory under control is a concern of every administrator. Here are some of the tools Microsoft 365 offers to help make that easier:
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Naming policies - Naming policies allow you define what are, and are not, acceptable names for your groups. That prevents users from giving profane or prohibited names to groups. Additionally you can enforce company standard prefixes or suffixes to the group names.
Dynamic membership - Dynamic membership allows you to set group membership by rule, which adds (or removes) group members based on metadata (such as department or role) in your active directory. See Using attributes to create advanced rules for more information on creating dynamic membership.
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Hidden membership - If you have a reason to want the membership of your group to be confidential, for example if the members are students, you can hide the membership from outside parties.
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Creation permissions - There may be some people in your organization that you don't want to be able to create new groups. There are several techniques for managing creation permissions in your directory. See Manage Microsoft 365 Group Creation.
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Audit logs - You can have more confidence allowing your users to create groups and manage group membership because Microsoft 365 Groups audit logs let you track down who created or deleted a particular group or made changes to the membership of the group. See: Search the audit log in the Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance Center.
Delivery management gives you some methods to handle how messages should be sent or received by the group. Additionally there are tools to monitor the flow of those messages. See Microsoft 365 Groups - common tasks for more info.
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Send as or Send on Behalf of - These settings allow specified users to send emails as if they came from, or are on behalf of, the group.
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Sender restrictions - These settings allow you to control who is allowed to send messages to the group. The group can be configured to allow email from outside parties, but you may want to restrict that to only specific outside parties.
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External user support - By inviting guests to your group you can choose to have them included in the email conversations in the group. See Adding guests to Groups in Outlook to learn how to add guests.
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Transport rules - Transport rules work for groups just as they do for your Exchange server. The rules can look for messages that meet specific conditions and can then take action on those messages.
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MailTips - MailTips are informative messages displayed to users while they're composing a message. They can help reduce NDRs by warning a user if their message is likely to go to outside parties, or exceed message quotas.
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Multiple proxy addresses - A group can have aliases just like a user mailbox does. Additional proxy addresses can be handy for accepting messages sent to those other aliases or for making it easier to reach a group that has a long or hard to spell name. For more info, see Choose the domain to use when creating Microsoft 365 groups
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Max Send/Receive size - These quotas can help reduce issues with the group receiving (or sending) extremely large messages in order to better manage storage and bandwidth requirements.
Microsoft 365 also gives you some tools to manage the kind of content that gets shared in your group. See Microsoft 365 Groups - common tasks for more info.
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Usage guidelines - You’ll be able to define usage guidelines for Microsoft 365 Groups—to educate your users about best practices that help keep their groups effective and educate them on internal content policies.
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Data classification - You’ll be able to create a customizable data classification system for Microsoft 365 Groups that allows separation of groups by policy type (e.g., “unclassified,” “corporate confidential” or “top secret”). In this manner, your groups can exhibit the policies of other content in your organization. Extensible policy allows your organization to configure an endpoint that is called whenever a group is created or changed—and you can then implement your own policies for group creation or change.
Any Microsoft 365 subscription that has Exchange Online and SharePoint Online will support groups. That includes the Business Essentials and Business Premium plans, and the Enterprise E1, E3 and E5 plans.
If you have an Exchange-only plan, you can still get the shared Inbox and shared Calendar features of groups in Outlook but you won't get the document library, Planner or any of the other capabilities.
Users are sometimes uncomfortable with change so it's important to communicate with the existing members of your distribution lists to let them know what to expect. Here is some of the information you should include in this message, along with some answers you may find helpful:
What are Groups in Outlook?
Microsoft 365 groups in Outlook are a single collaboration solution for teams/groups that want a place to share discussions, files, calendars and notes in a unified way that is easy to find. Probably the single-best feature is that the Inbox for the group maintains a history of the discussions, making it easy to search previous discussions.
Find more info at The Groups experience in Outlook.
Why are we making this change?
People have frequently requested the ability to search the messages posted to our distribution list in order to find information that's been discussed in the past. Upgrading the distribution list to a group means that people don't have to ask or answer the same questions over and over.
Also the new group will include a calendar for our group events, a shared files library and a OneNote Notebook where we can collaborate and gather information for future reference.
Do I need to do anything to join this group if I was already a member of the distribution list?
No, if you were already a member of the distribution list you'll automatically be a member of the new group.
How do I access the new group in Outlook? What about Outlook on the Web?
To access the new group in Outlook just go to the Groups category towards the bottom of the navigation pane on the left. If you use this group often consider pinning it as a favorite by right-clicking on it and choosing Show as favorite.
Additionally there are free mobile clients for Microsoft 365 Groups available on every mobile platform (iOS, Android, etc.) so you can easily access the group on the go.
Can't I still just email?
Yes, of course. The same email alias you used for the distribution list will still work just fine for the group in Outlook.
Also...
Remember to tell them when this change is occurring and who they should contact if they have further questions.
Microsoft doesn't provide a tool to convert a shared mailbox to a Microsoft 365 group, or vice versa. However, you can upgrade distribution lists to Microsoft 365 groups. It's a great way to give your organization's distribution lists all the features and functionality of Microsoft 365 groups. See Microsoft 365 Groups - common tasks for more info.
Which distribution lists cannot be upgraded to Microsoft 365 groups?
You can upgrade only cloud-managed, simple, non-nested distribution lists to Microsoft 365 groups. See Can't upgrade distribution lists to Microsoft 365 groups.
Once you've upgraded your distribution group to a Microsoft 365 group there are a few follow-up tasks you may want to do in order to ensure it goes smoothly.
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Follow-up with your users - Check in with them immediately after the upgrade is complete, and then again a few days later. Showing that you're listening and responsive to any questions they might have will go a long way towards making them happy and comfortable with the change.
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Monitor the engagement reports - The Microsoft 365 Admin Portal has some good reports that can show you how many users are using the group, how often and what features they're using. Those reports can help you to design your follow-up and user training as well as highlight where your users are getting the most value from the new group. See: Activity Reports in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
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Share your experience - Let other teams in your company know that you upgraded your distribution group and what steps you took to make it successful! Sharing that information can help those other teams follow your example and have a successful upgrade of their own.
Have questions about Microsoft 365 Groups? Visit the Microsoft 365 Groups Tech Community.
Tip: By default, all users can create Microsoft 365 groups. Learn more at Manage who can create Microsoft 365 Groups.
You can create Microsoft 365 Groups from a variety of tools including Outlook, Outlook on the web, Outlook Mobile, SharePoint, Planner, Teams and more. Which tool you choose to start from depends on what kind of group you're working with. For example, at Microsoft we tend to start from Outlook when we're creating a Group organized around email and calendar. If the Group is for company-wide communication we tend to start with Viva Engage. For chat-based collaboration, we'd start our Group from Microsoft Teams.
Neither public groups nor private groups can be seen or accessed by people outside of your organization unless those people have been specifically invited as guests. See Adding guests to Groups in Outlook for more info.
Manage owners, members, and guests
Group owners are the moderators of the group. They can add or remove members and have unique permissions like the ability to delete conversations from the shared inbox or change different settings about the group. Group owners can rename the group, update the description or picture, and more. If you're familiar with SharePoint roles, then a group owner is a site collection admin.
Tip: It's best practice to have at least two owners for a Group, if you can. That way if one owner is unavailable the other can make changes to the Group.
Group members are the regular users in your organization who use the group to collaborate. They can access everything in the group but can't change group settings. In the SharePoint world they are site members. For information about adding or removing group members, see Add, edit, and remove members of Groups in Outlook.
Guests are like group members, but they are outside your organization. By default, your users can invite guests to join your group, and you can control that setting. For more information, see Adding guests to Groups in Outlook.
Use Microsoft Teams for a persistent, chat-based workspace
An excellent way to keep in touch with your group is Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is the inner loop for your team – a persistent, chat-based workspace where you can have informal, real-time, conversations around very focused topics or specific sub-groups within the group. Although the Teams integration doesn't come automatically, you can easily create a Teams group based on your Microsoft 365 Group.
After a Group outlives its intended purpose, you can delete it to free up system resources and to remove the group from being listed or displayed. See Edit or delete a Group in Outlook for more info. If you don't want to have to remember to delete outdated groups your administrator can set expiration policies that will cause old groups to expire and be removed automatically after a specified period of time. See also: Microsoft 365 Group Expiration Policy.
There are three primary models of provisioning Microsoft 365 Groups: Open, IT-led, or Controlled. Each has its own advantages.
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Advantages |
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Open (default) |
Users can create their own groups as needed without needing to wait for, or bother, IT |
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IT-led |
Users request a group from IT. IT can guide them in selecting the best collaboration tools for their needs |
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Controlled |
Group creation restricted to specific people, teams, or services (See: Control who can create Microsoft 365 Groups) |
If you want to control how your Microsoft 365 Groups are named, you can use naming policy to force Group names to adhere to certain standards, including prefixed or suffixes, as well as blocking objectionable names. See Microsoft 365 Groups Naming Policy for more information.
Every group has at least one owner that can add or remove members and do some basic curation of the group and its content. If a group's owner (or owners) leaves the organization for any reason, the administrator can assign a new owner to the group. See Assign a new owner to an orphaned group.
Additionally, if you have Exchange Online Administrator permissions you can administer your groups from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (See Manage Group membership in the Microsoft 365 admin center) or from PowerShell (See Manage Microsoft 365 Groups with PowerShell.
There may come a time when you want to delete a group from your tenant. For information on how to delete a group see: Delete a group in Outlook. If a group is accidentally deleted, admins can restore that group for up to 30 days. See: Restore a deleted Microsoft 365 Group.
If you prefer a more automated way to manage the lifecycle of your Microsoft 365 Groups, you can use expiration policies to expire groups at a specific time interval. The group's owners will get an email 30, 15, and 1 day before the group expiration that allows them to easily renew the group if it's still needed. See: Microsoft 365 Group Expiration Policy.
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Allow members to send as or send on behalf of a Microsoft 365 Group
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Change a site's title, description, logo, and site information settings
Microsoft 365 Group limits
Find Group limits at Overview of Microsoft 365 Groups for administrators.
If you are planning to use the feature "Group Writeback" from Azure Active Directory Connect tool, the maximum length is 448 characters related to the "Description" attribute.
For more information on SharePoint Online storage see SharePoint Online Limits.
Managing your Microsoft 365 Groups is more effective when you have actionable information about Groups usage. The Microsoft 365 Admin Center has a reporting tool that can let you see information such as storage use, how many active Groups you have, and even how your users are using the Groups. See: Microsoft 365 Reports in the admin center for more information.
Microsoft 365 Groups gives you a number of tools for compliance, information protection, and eDiscovery.
