Forum Discussion
Office 365 Groups and Categorize emails
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.
It has been often said before and I guess it's worth saying again that Office 365 Groups are not the silver bullet for all forms of collaboration that exists within the service. Sometimes, as in this instance, shared mailboxes are a better solution because you have full access to all of the Outlook desktop features that interact with the mailbox. I should imagine that it would take quite a bit of engineering effort to enable Outlook to support the same functionality with Groups.
The best advice is to keep on using shared mailboxes. They work.
Google already has the collaborative Inbox since long time and it simply delivered what people require.
Office 365 is there also for long time and when it started to offer groups, it did not deliver a unified complete solution for enterprises, but an experience that has not much customization and then we are hearing that we should continue use shared groups.
So I imagine our teams will have shared mailboxes that cannot be accessed via mobile and then office groups for another type of collaboration.we are getting heat from management why dont we simply use google collaboration if it delivered a unified solution and i am fighting to keep using O365.
We are in a position that we need to deliver full business solution. At least planner has roadmap for mobile app and will have ability to invite external parties so those are needed features and microsoft will deliver. But for groups the roadmap doesnt have totally new features, so we are not sure what would be the future of groups.
Dont get me wrong, I love O365 and love groups, but if groups is going to be the next big thing then we expect it to deliver like other solutions in the market at least.
We cannit go with (ok use shared mailboxes for this and DL for that and groups for this) instead people wants one unified workplace. If groups is not gonna deliver then it will not be deployed. People will not go with two solution they want one.
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.
I disagree in almost every way. That is a developer point of view, and it's extremely short sighted. As an engineer, I can tell you that as of Today, nearly every Office 365 app is missing critical features. For this to have been a discussion in December of 2016, and in January of 2018 you still can't categorize or organize messages in every way, is just ridiculous. So many apps are missing the features that would make them work, I'm not talking about major changes, but to introduce a Group type Email feature and forget that users might want to be able to organize or categorize mail in that group, is insane, and illustrates to me a disconnect between the developers and the user base. It's like releasing a new Car and having the steering wheel be a "TBD" feature. You need to at least have the basics in place before you release apps and I think MS is in such a rush to keep up with all the new cloud type vendors (Slack, etc) that they are rushing products to market long before they're ready.
+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!
I disagree in almost every way. That is a developer point of view, and it's extremely short sighted. As an engineer, I can tell you that as of Today, nearly every Office 365 app is missing critical features. For this to have been a discussion in December of 2016, and in January of 2018 you still can't categorize or organize messages in every way, is just ridiculous. So many apps are missing the features that would make them work, I'm not talking about major changes, but to introduce a Group type Email feature and forget that users might want to be able to organize or categorize mail in that group, is insane, and illustrates to me a disconnect between the developers and the user base.
I agree Tony to some degree.
I am working with multiple customers all around the world, and when introducing the Office Group, 90% to them, they ask for similar if not better shared mailbox experience in addition to the other group capabilities.
It is not like customers behaving like babies. It is what enterprises want. If we are going to give them Office group experience and shard workspace, then teams will want more options than the shared mailbox experience like assigning email thread to team members or see sent items.
Of course, Microsoft did offer shared mailbox before because they listen to customers and they know enterprises want such shared mailbox experience so why not deny them that on Office Groups.
Now, Office groups come and people asking for at least similar capabilities in the group mailbox, and this is fair request and not a request that came from nowhere.
I guess if office groups is to be the next collaboration experience, then we cannot push people to shared mailboxes and at same time to office group. People will be confused and they will not have time to move between the two solutions.
Also, Microsoft till now did not enhance the shared mailbox experience since years. Take this example that we hear from most of our customers. I want a shared mail experience for customer support where team members can see email threats, they can be assigned to specific mail threat and can see un answered threats. Simple but long asked solution. Shared Mailbox deliver some of those requirements but not all of them till the moment, that is why we see people use email categorization for assignment.
Now when we introduce Office group as the next big think, not only they expect it to deliver like shared mailboxes, but they expect to make their life easier.
This is fair request, and Microsoft should hear the feedback, and embrace it, instead of pushing people to stick to shared mailboxes or not to dare to compare their products with other competitors.
I talked to the Office Group product group at Ignite 2016 at Atlanta and I hope they hear what people are asking for. This is software industry, and everyone is delivering solutions in the market. If people find a solution that delivers what they want, they will go for it, and we hope they will stick to Office 365, and that is why we are delivering this feedback.
The role of Office 365 Product Group is to listen to feedback and deliver features, and the role of us as IT Pro is to hear people and deliver that feedback to product group. This is software industry and open market, and customers have the right to behave like “Baby” and pick the product that fits their needs. Hard fact but this is a reality.
We seem to talk to different customers. I can't recall a single customer asking me about shared mailbox-type functionality for Office 365 Groups. Perhaps it is the way that I position Office 365 Groups and make it quite clear that Groups are not the swiss knife of collaboration.
Groups use different identification and authentication methods than do individual users. It's therefore reasonable to assert that some work would be required to introduce shared mailbox-like functionality into Groups. If we agree that work is required, let me then ask the questions:
1. How essential is this work given that a perfectly adequate solution (shared mailboxes) already exists?
2. How important is it to give Groups shared mailbox functionality when so many other requirements exist, like soft-delete, more seamless hybrid interoperability, and so on?
Personally, I can easily make a case to customers that they have shared mailboxes already and can use them while Microsoft gets on with the work to enable a whole pile of new functionality for Groups that doesn't exist now and is necessary for operational reasons.
You've also got to remember that you're using a cloud service. One of the aspects of cloud services is that their functionality is tailored to meet the needs of the many rather than the specific requirements of the few. If you want to customize software to the nth degree, use on-premises servers. When you decide to use the cloud, you have to accept that you can't get everything to work just the way that you want. In return and in compensation, you get a faster pace of innovation and updates that might one day give you what you really want. Customers who choose the cloud and then demand that the cloud works the way that they want are behaving like babies. They wouldn't ask the electricity company to provide a special version of power for them, would they?
