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What is the relationship between Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and Microsoft services?
What is the relationship between Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and Microsoft services?
Updated this week

Understand how Microsoft Teams works with Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, and other Microsoft 365 services, to improve your teams and groups governance.

Index

Microsoft 365 Groups

A Microsoft 365 Group is a membership service in Active directory that allows you to connect multiple Microsoft 365 teamwork services. By default, a Group will always provide a select group of users access to these shared services:

  • Exchange inbox* and calendar*

  • SharePoint team site*

  • Planner

  • Power BI

  • Stream

A Group can also provide your group of users access to these other services:

  • Teams*

  • Yammer

  • Project for the web

  • Roadmap

For more information on groups, see Learn about Microsoft 365 Groups.

Note: To detect inactive teams and groups, ShareGate looks for activity in the workspaces listed above (*). For more information, see How does ShareGate crawl workspaces to detect inactive teams and groups?

The relationship between Microsoft 365 Groups, Teams, and other services

Teams is a chat-based collaboration hub based on the foundation of Microsoft 365 Groups. It was created to facilitate teamwork in the Microsoft productivity suite.

The graphic below illustrates the relationship between Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and other Microsoft services.

M365_Groups__Microsoft_Teams__and_other_services.svg

In this example, Teams is the hub for teamwork, SharePoint provides content storage and file-sharing capabilities, Exchange provides a shared inbox and calendar, Planner provides a task-based workflow, and Microsoft 365 Groups unites these services in the background by managing how users can access these services through shared permissions and security settings.

For more information about groups and teams, see Microsoft 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams.

Manage your teams and groups using ShareGate

ShareGate gives you visibility over your Microsoft environment so you can manage and govern your teams and groups.

Tip: Update your policies and governance strategies in the Settings so ShareGate can help you manage your teams and groups automatically.

Manage

Choose between your tenant's Teams or All Groups. You can apply filters, make bulk action changes, and export the data as a CSV file.

For more information, see Manage your environment.

Note: Since a team's membership, security settings, and connected services are provided by the connected Microsoft 365 group, you can manage your teams in ShareGate through the groups. Because of this, the number of Groups listed represents all the teams and groups in your tenant (the groups without a connected team plus the groups with a connected team).

Team and group details

Manage an individual team or group from the team and group details.

For information on managing the membership and security settings, see Edit membership and Team and group security settings.

Activity

Monitor day-to-day activity in your teams and groups by selecting Activity. Choose between your tenant's Teams or All Groups, then add filters, and export information whenever you need.

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