All ContentFrequently Asked Questions: Office 365 Groups
Frequently Asked Questions: Office 365 Groups
1. What’s the difference
between an Office 365
group and an Exchange
distribution list (DL)?
A group also has an associated SharePoint site collection, a OneNote
Both Exchange distribution lists and Office 365 groups enable you to
notebook, and shared group resources in applications like Microsoft
send email to many recipients at once. So what’s the difference? Do
a group is created, the Office 365 service spins up resources in the associated Office 365 workloads, and members of the group automatically
have permissions to access those resources. In particular, each Office
365 group has a shared mailbox and calendar. Emails sent to the group
are not only distributed to all members, as they would with an Exchange
DL, they are also stored in a separate mailbox.
Teams, Yammer, Planner and PowerBI. Members can access all of the
you need both?
resources and participate in all the Office 365 workloads attached to the
Exchange DLs have been around a long time and are used as a matter of
only construct.
course in most organizations. Their sole purpose is to provide a convenient way to send email to a set of recipients without having to type all
their email addresses each time. For example, managers often create
a DL for their direct reports, and HR might create one DL for regular
employees and a separate DL for contractors. Distribution lists are available in both on-premises Exchange and Exchange Online.
group. Of course, unlike distribution lists, Office 365 groups are a cloud-
Another important difference between Office 365 groups and Exchange
distributions lists is that all the collaboration that happens in an Office
365 group is persistent — if a new member is added to the group, they’ll
have access to all the content that has been posted since the inception of the group, including but not limited to the content of the group’s
mailbox. If a new member is added to a DL, on the other hand, they’ll only
get email communication from that point forward.
Distributions lists are for email only; Office
365 groups have far broader reach.
So, do you need both? Almost certainly. Exchange DLs are widely used
because they are so convenient, and often the limited functionality they
provide is exactly what you want — to send email and nothing more.
When you create an Office 365 group, you are creating resources and
An Office 365 group has far broader reach than a DL. The group itself is
nothing more than an Azure AD object that contains members. But when
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data that need to be secured and managed, so you should create Office
365 groups only when you need the collaboration benefits, not just
to send email.
2. What’s the difference between an
Office 365 group and a Team?
Microsoft Teams is a platform that provides chat, meetings, notes and attachments. When you
create a Team in the application, you’re creating a workspace for collaboration — including an associated Office 365 group that is created automatically. A number of other Microsoft applications, such
as Yammer, create Office 365 groups under the covers in the same way. You can also create Office
365 groups directly.
A good way to think of the difference between a group and a Team is that groups are a functional
pillar that can be used either on their own or as part of an application like Teams.
Office 365 groups are a functional pillar that can be used either on
their own or as part of an application like Microsoft Teams.
Which do you want? It depends on your needs. If you create your own Office 365 group directly,
you’ll have a shared mailbox and shared calendaring, as well as the other resources and workloads
described earlier. Your team can interact with the associated Office 365 functionality directly in the
associated Office 365 applications like the group SharePoint site collection.
When you create a Team, the Teams application automatically creates an Office 365 group and its
associated resources and workflows, but you don’t use them directly; the Teams application uses
them on your behalf. For example, when you chat on a Team channel, the application stores that
content in the SharePoint Online site collection associated with the Office 365 group for the Team,
and members can view it later from the Teams interface; they don’t need to open SharePoint Online
or even know that’s where it is stored. But when you create an Office 365 group directly, you have
to go to SharePoint Online yourself to see the content stored there.
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