Within the Microsoft suite of tools that Dartmouth licenses for all faculty, staff and students, there is a feature called Office 365 Groups. These are shared workspaces where group members can collectively get things done.
What is an Office 365 Group?
An Office 365 group is a space for team collaboration. It comes with a shared:
- Mailbox for group email communication
- Calendar for scheduling group meetings and events
- Library for storing and working on group files and folders
- OneNote notebook for taking project and meeting notes
- Planning tool for organizing and assigning tasks and getting updates on project progress
How would an Office 365 Group help me collaborate?
Rather than emailing questions, information or files around, just send a link to the group site and everyone can access the information and work on files there.
In addition, multiple members of the Group can be working on the same Office document at the same time. You’ll see in the upper right corner of the window everyone who is currently working on that document.
What’s the difference between an Office 365 Group and a group mailing list?
A group mailing list just allows you to email information, files, calendar invites to a group of people. With a group mailing list, everything is stored in everyone’s mailbox. Rather than sending an email to the group with a status update, or new information, you can include that in the Office 365 group’s conversation pane so that everyone can see all conversations related to the group topic in one place; they won’t have to search through everything in their inbox to find it. Additionally, when someone new joins the group, they automatically have access to all conversations, files and data stored in the Office 365 group. With a group mailing list, they would miss everything that happened before they were added to the list.
Are there limitations to Office 365 groups?
- You can have up to 1,000 members in a group.
- There can be up to 10 owners per group.
- You can store up to 25TB of data in a group.
- Any individual can create up to 250 groups.
How do I create an Office 365 group?
See https://services.dartmouth.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=66575.
Want more information?
See https://services.dartmouth.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=67017 or contact the IT Service Desk at 603-646-2999, via email at help@dartmouth.edu, or your department’s IT support office.