To help protect your data, we are asking staff and students to stop creating a 365 Group or a SharePoint ‘team site’. Due to an update to Outlook, some Group information and the membership can become visible.

To keep colleagues and information safe, use a Microsoft Team or a SharePoint Communications site to hold information and collaborate safely. Both of those are fully secure and do not reveal their membership (remember to not set anything to public!)

Instead, you can create a Microsoft Team (you can find guidance here) and ensure you keep it set to private. The image below shows the recommended choices for Teams:

Teams allows you to share information to subsets of people inside the Team.

If you are unsure of what a Group or Sharepoint Team site is, you can find information on them in this guide.

To ensure data is protected in line with UK GDPR, Digital and Technology Services have taken steps to hide Microsoft Groups from the email address book and Outlook. Users of groups will have received a number of emails titled ‘GDPR and your Microsoft Group’. These automated emails were required to inform Group members of the change to hide Groups from non-members to protect the Group title and membership.

If you were in receipt of these emails, they are for information only and no further action is required.

Further advice and assistance can be found here to help you migrate from a Group or a Sharepoint Team site to using a more suitable collaboration choice within 365 (a Comms Site or Microsoft Team).

If you would like to know more about the different choices around collaborating and storing data in 365, you can watch the video and guide, Shopfronts, Workshops, and Museums.