PennO365 Groups

Office 365 Groups

Office 365 Groups is designed to promote and facilitate collaboration. Other O365 applications utilize Groups’ functionality to allow collaboration between teammates when writing documents, creating spreadsheets, working on project plans, scheduling meetings or sending email. All PennO365 users will be able to create Groups. A new Group creates a collection of shared resources (a distribution list, mailbox, calendar, document space, and OneNote notebook) that multiple O365 users can access.

PennO365 Tenant & ISC Support

As of September 30, 2017, Office 365 Groups is enabled on the PennO365 tenant; however, ISC’s evaluation of Groups is still ongoing at this time.  Supporting documentation for Office 365 Groups will be updated based upon ISC’s findings and feedback from the Penn community.

ISC support for Office 365 Groups is limited to issues arising from problems within the PennO365 environment; issues restricted to  individual Groups fall outside of this scope.  ISC will provide general usage guidance and assistance to LSPs with Groups on a “best effort” basis.

O365 Groups Guidelines

Creating Groups - Groups, public or private, can be created by any PennO365 account holder. By default, the person who creates the Group is assigned as its administrator. Private Groups are restricted to members only. Public Groups are viewable by any student, faculty or staff member with a PennO365 mailbox. Group names are searchable in the directory and will have a contact card listing Group membership.  The PennO365 service keeps an audit log that records Groups and the users who created them.

Group Administrators - Administrators can add and remove Group members, elevate members to administrator status and rename or delete the Group. Group administrators should exercise caution when deleting Groups as all conversations, email, files, calendar events and related Group information are permanently removed and cannot be recovered. Group administrators who are leaving the University should elevate another member to administrator to ensure the group will continue to be used.

Group Names - Office 365 Groups at Penn are limited to the o365lists.upenn.edu domain. Group names should be descriptive, specific and should not contain abbreviations. Additionally, Group names should not be the same as University departments or organizations unless those entities are creating and administering the Group. It is highly recommended that Group names adhere to the PennO365 non-PennKey account naming standards to avoid Group name collisions. ISC reserves the right to disable any Groups with a name that is deemed offensive by the Penn community, is used for harassment or threats, or adversely affects the business operations of the University.