This post is the next in my series concerning my revision for the MB2-713 certification (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales), this time I will continue to look at integration by covering Office 365 Groups.

The next piece in the team collaboration jigsaw is Office 365 Groups. (I have already covered other connected topics such as OneNote, SharePoint, Skype and Yammer.)

With Office 365 Groups, you can collaborate with people across your company … even if they aren’t Dynamics CRM users. Office 365 Groups provide a single location to share documents, conversations, meetings, and more. They offer shared workspaces for email, conversations, files and even calendar events.

Enabling Office 365 Groups

Before installing Office 365 Groups you will need an Office 365 subscription that includes Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Then Office 365 Groups can be installed as a managed solution, with CRM online this is available in the administration center for CRM

Once installed Office 365 Groups can be configured from the settings area of CRM.

The list of possible entities for Office 365 Groups is limited to a defined set of system entities. Including account, contact, lead, case etc. Plus, any custom entities you create. (Below I have added a test custom entity to demonstrate this.)

Having selected the entities, you wish to enable Office 365 Groups for the “Publish All” button is used to enable them for groups.

Note, this is the same as doing a publish all from the customizations area of CRM. Meaning that any unpublished customizations would be made live at the same time. (So watch for that!)

Using Office 365 Groups

Once Office 365 Groups has been enabled you can navigate to the Office 365 Groups option on the entity and from there start a group. Or connect to an existing one.

After a short pause a group will be created. You are now able to manage a group calendar, engage in conversations, share documents and access a OneNote notebook directly from this page.

Also this group can be accessed directly from Outlook online. Meaning all of this information can be shared with user who do not have access to CRM. This is very important from a collaboration point of view.

Any groups created can be seen and administered in the admin center of Office 365. It is important to be aware that additional groups could exist here that are not related to CRM.

If the group is removed in Office 365, CRM would not be aware of that change and would continue to search for the old location. Also, as with SharePoint and OneNote removing a CRM record will not remove the Office 365 Group.

I hope this post have given a flavour for Office 365 Groups and covered the main points which I expect to be included in the MB2-713 exam. As always I can’t predict what might come up in the exam, so getting some hands on time will be really useful. J