Office 365 Groups is becoming a backbone of team collaboration: here’s what’s new for April

Compared to last month, the Office 365 Team has a ton of new features and enhancements for Office 365 Groups available in the April 2017 update. Christophe Fiessinger details all of the newest additions of the April 2017 update to Office 365 in a new blog post. With over 80 million daily users, Microsoft built Office 365 to deliver the tools needed to enhance efficiency and productivity on one manageable platform.

Office 365 Groups is quickly becoming a backbone of team collaboration using any app they need to use, including Outlook, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Planner, Yammer, OneNote and Microsoft Teams. Office 365 Groups helps enterprise users communicate and collaborate across all of these applications in the easiest way possible.

Starting today, the Office 365 Team added more enhancements in an effort to help IT admins to more easily manage Office 365 Groups.

• Restore deleted groups—If you deleted an Office 365 group, it’s now retained by default for a period of 30 days. Within that period, you can restore the group and its associated apps and data via a new PowerShell cmdlet.
• Retention policies—Manage group content produced by setting up retention policies to keep what you want and get rid of what you don’t need. Admins can now create Office 365 Groups retention policies that apply to the group’s shared inbox and files in one step using the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center.
• Label management—With labels, you can classify Office 365 Groups emails and documents across your organization for governance, and enforce retention rules based on that classification.

Fiessinger also pointed out some new features and enhancements on the way for Office 365 Groups in the next few months. Office 365 Groups will be adding a new expiry policy, Azure AD naming policy, default classifications and classification descriptions, and classifications available when creating or modifying a group across Office 365 applications.

Announcing an Office 365 Groups AMA! Join us at 9am PT on April 13, 2017 https://t.co/pWthY6Z5kT #Office365Groups pic.twitter.com/THS5BzgTmw

— Christophe Fiessinger (@cfiessinger) April 6, 2017

Fiessinger announced on Twitter that an AMA session on the Microsoft Tech Community will take place on April 13, 2017, at 9:00 AM PDT to discuss these and current and future Office 365 Groups admin features, enhancements, and updates.