An Outlook Group is a Microsoft 365 Group that comes with a central group inbox for sending and receiving emails and a central calendar for tracking shared events. An Outlook Group also includes a shared workspaces connected to SharePoint and other Office 365 apps.

When you create an Outlook Group, you get:

1. An Outlook email inbox to record conversations between Group members;
2. A shared Outlook calendar to post events and appointments that affect Group members;
3. A SharePoint team site collection (which you access through the “Files” tab);
4. A OneNote notebook (which actually lives in your SharePoint site collection);
5. A Plan in Planner;
6. A Stream video portal;
7. A Forms workspace; and
8. A Power BI workspace* (if you have premium Power BI licenses for all members).

Under default Office 365 settings, an Outlook Group is automatically created (and will display in Outlook under the Groups listing) when you create a new Team Site in SharePoint Online, a Plan in Planner, or a Group in Microsoft Stream.

An Outlook Group is kind of the base type of Office 365 Group. Most of your colleagues are likely familiar with Outlook and could migrate to using Groups faster in Outlook than trying to get them into Yammer or Teams if they’re not familiar with that communication method. So, an Outlook Group can be a nice, easy intro to this new collaborative world.

Graphical overview

For more information on Office 365 Groups, see our complete Microsoft 365 Groups infographic.

*Note: A last-generation Power BI Workspace is created if you have the license for Power BI. The newer generation of Power BI workspaces has been disconnected from Office 365 Groups so you will not receive a new-gen BI workspace with an Outlook Group nor will an Outlook Group be created when you create a new-gen BI Workspace.