Microsoft OneDrive Groups is Gone

Our own Michael Otey wrote up a great piece recently declaring the value of OneDrive Groups. His article caused me to go check out this seemingly hidden feature of OneDrive. Unfortunately, Michael's article came too late because Microsoft's silence on the Groups feature was probably because they were already planning to axe it.

Issued as a statement only in the OneDrive forums on the Microsoft answers site, Forum Moderator, Levi_I announced to the world that OneDrive Groups has been discontinued, but only after customers started noticing that creating new groups resulted in the following error:

Sorry, you cannot create new groups or invite people to existing groups in OneDrive. You can still work with existing groups the way you used to.

Levi_I announced it like this…

And, of course, the forum response to the announcement was none too kind. DanglingPointer put it best…

When did that happen?

There is no announcement from Microsoft that they are dropping Groups support from OneDrive.

Should we expect the same surprises from the other OneDrive features? We wake up a morning and find out some feature just disappear…

The solution to replace the functionality of OneDrive Groups is to utilize OneDrive's share functionality instead and really produces the same results. Sharing still allows file and folder sharing and sharing invitations. File and folder modifications and restrictions remain much the same, however multiple owners cannot be assigned. So, just viewing and editing.

Full information on how to work with OneDrive sharing is located here: Share files and folders and change permissions