Collaborating with Microsoft 365

First of all, groups are the foundation of the collaboration tools on the Microsoft 365 platform. They are what make it possible to share resources and work as a team.

**It's important to understand that we're talking about a Microsoft 365 group here, not a contact group or a distribution list created in your personal Outlook, which won't be accessible for sharing and administration purposes.*

Groups

Microsoft 365 groups make it possible to give a group of people access to resources such as:

• A shared Outlook inbox
• A shared calendar
• A SharePoint document library
• A planner
• A OneNote notebook
• A team (Teams)
• And more

While it's possible to give individual people access to these resources, groups help centralize and standardize access management. For example, when the new employee in the sales department needs access to all the necessary resources, you can simply add them to the "sales" group. This group can have access to the general channel in Teams, the sales planner, the SharePoint site dedicated to sales, and the shared mailbox and its calendar assigned to sales. The employee will also be among the recipients of all communications sent to that group's email address.

You can see how tedious it would be to go into each Microsoft service (Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, etc.), find everything dedicated to sales, and grant access to that person, when all you need to do is add them to the "sales" group that gives access to all the necessary resources. What's more, granting access one person at a time can get messy, because it increases the time required to get an employee up and running and actively contributes to slowing down everyone's workflow when access is given piecemeal.

You might say, yes, but if a group already has an email address, why would we need a distribution list?

What is a distribution list?

For the seasoned warriors who have used Outlook for a long time, it goes without saying that distribution lists have always been a powerful tool for communicating with groups of people within the organization. Today, you could say the groups described above are a modern version of these distribution lists, except they bring a bit more in terms of features. So when it's strictly about exchanging emails and nothing more, a distribution list is the best option. That said, you can always convert a distribution list into a group.

Just like a group, communications sent to the address are received in each member's individual inbox. This is where shared mailboxes set themselves apart.

What is a shared mailbox?

A shared mailbox is an email mailbox where several users have delegated access, allowing them to manage incoming and outgoing emails.

A concrete example we often see in companies, one that doesn't follow security best practices at all, is the following: you have an email account where you share the password with whoever needs it and where two-factor authentication is disabled because it would be "too complicated" given the number of people accessing it. In this case, what you probably need is a shared mailbox.

A shared mailbox acts as a full-fledged account. The difference is that access is managed through the management console using groups. This way, access control to the mailbox is centralized, and everyone in the group with delegated access can access the inbox for that address. What's more, there's no need to configure anything on the user's computer; the mailbox appears when they log in to their company email account.

To conclude,

You add members to a group and share resources with those groups. A shared mailbox is a resource, just like a SharePoint site or a Teams team.A distribution list is a type of group reserved for email notifications.

There are also several types of groups, and it's possible to let users manage these groups with certain limitations. We'll cover that in an upcoming article.

Don't hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or for recommendations.