Forum Discussion
Office 365 Groups and Categorize emails
- Dec 01, 2016
I disagree. You can't point to a single feature enabled in one product and say that every other product on the market should offer an equivalent. That's not the way that things work. And any reasonable assessment of what G Suite offers in terms of functionalty will conclude that Office 365 has more. (My view on the matter is at https://www.petri.com/battle-cloud-supremacy).
Customers can't behave like babies and stamp their feet and say "we want" either. That's no way to exploit the potential of software. Instead, after they make a decision as to what cloud application suite to use (hopefully Office 365), they need to understand the capabilities of what's available and decide what makes sense for them to use in the context of their business requirements. There is seldom a 100% perfect fit, so some compromise is necessary. Heat from management might highlight an issue, but it won't solve it. Nor will it make software change to create new functionality.
The Office 365 Groups roadmap has a lot of new features coming in the relatively near future (see the Ignite sessions for details). Some of those features (like soft-delete) are absolutely more important than shared access to a group mailbox through Outlook desktop, especially when a perfectly reasonable alternative (regular shared mailboxes) exists.
All software follows a development plan. Features in that plan are weighted against other demands in order of importance. My perspective (and feel free to disagree) is that what you're looking for is relatively low importance when compared to other features, like making sure that the hybrid experience for groups is more seamless than it is now. You can lobby for the feature you want... But you'd probably be better off understanding the full breadth of collaborative capabilities that exist within Office 365 so that you can guide customers to make the right choice for their needs. In fact, it seems like Outlook desktop is the point of unification here as both shared mailboxes and groups are resources accessible through the same client.
What you can also point to is the dramatic evolution of Office 365 Groups since their introduction two years ago. Groups have come a long way. More needs to be done and will be done, if not when and how some people expect that to happen.
+1 for Mail Assignments (maybe by categories or any other field)
+1 for Completion indication (maybe by folders or any other filter)
I agree this is a must have for groups!
Let me add them to folders.
Let me categorize them with color
Let non owners delete even
Give me a status to filter on
Anything...
- mark007Dec 23, 2022Copper ContributorIt's almost 2023 and still this:
"It's 2021. Give me ANY way to categorize group conversations. Any way. Please.
Let me add them to folders.
Let me categorize them with color
Let non owners delete even
Give me a status to filter on
Anything..."- FerranGilApr 25, 2024Copper ContributorInterestingly, it is possible to move an email with a category from the user's inbox to the Group inbox, and it retains the category.
Even if you click on the category, it filters the emails that contain that category in the Group mailbox.
- Victor_IvanidzeApr 02, 2021Bronze ContributorWe are going to release an add-in for desktop Outlook (for Windows) that will allow a user to categorize messages in O365 groups and set their Importance to Low/Normal/High. I'll inform you later.
- mhorner3Sep 09, 2021Copper Contributor
Victor_Ivanidze Hello Victor! Is there any update as to the status of this add-in? The company I work for has recently phased out the standard MS Outlook Shared Inbox at the global level and now only offers O365 Group Inboxes, which is a huge problem for us. I work in Document Controls and we use the Categories feature to help keep track of who's working on what, the status of requests, etc. when we have several document controllers working on a single, large project. I've been trying to figure out a workaround for weeks but O365 Groups does not seem to offer anything even remotely comparable to this feature. Any information you may have would be very much appreciated!
- Victor_IvanidzeSep 10, 2021Bronze Contributor
Hello mhorner3,
unfortunately this nut is much harder than I thought before ;(
At the moment we unable to find time and resources to develop such add-in.
If you are ready to pay for custom development please contact me directly.
- ITSourceProApr 08, 2021Iron ContributorWe'd be interested in categorizing and setting importance levels on messages in O365 groups!! Since that is where all our shared voicemails need to go for Teams.
- JimGrishamApr 01, 2021Steel ContributorBased on what some have discussed in the past, might many use cases currently shoe-horned into e-mail (with groups or otherwise) not be better served by using other tools, such as:
- Yammer
- Teams
- A database such as Azure SQL, with PowerApps as a frontend that can be created by non-programmer power users
- CRM software / service (Dynamics or 3rd party)
- Helpdesk-specific software/service (e.g. for the helpdesk / shared customer service inbox example from the beginning of the thread)
[Huge enterprises can put everything in a database with a custom UI or consultant-provided middleware, and tiny nonprofits can used shared mailboxes and Excel for most things. In the space between those two extremes seems to be where most complications appear.]