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.
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?
I understand your point of view.
It is a surprise to me that having shared mailbox like solution where you can assign people to handle specific emails in the shared mailbox is something people are not asking for. You said that you talk to different kind of customers, and frankly speaking havign you not hearing once such a requirement is a surprise to me.
So John, Joe, Ross and Lisa are in the same team and they have support@contoso.com email address that is assigned to shared mailbox. Ross as the team leader wants every email going to support@contoso.com to reach that shared mailbox, and want someone to declar that a specific threat will be answered by him. So Ross can come, open the shared mailbox, and see that Lisa makred a specific email communication so he knows she will handle it and so forth. This why everyone in the team knows who will handle each and every email thread.
Of course there is no mobile app for shared mailboxes but there is mobile app for Office groups. That is why people expected to use the shared mailbox feature of the office group feature.
So back to the question, do you think Google when they offer a similar feature to what I mentioned, it did not talked or listened to customers? ofcourse it did and google knows this is a logical natural needed feature that applies to large set of businesses and cases. That is why it is offered. This was years back.
So the fact that this is odd strange not asked for feature is out of the question. The fact that (we both talk to different customers) does not make sense to me frankly speaking.
Back to that O365 is cloud feature and customers should take the package as is. Well, this is old school way, and Microsoft knows that. Microsoft proved that it listend and adapt to what people need and they know they are not alone in the market, and they recently start to offer true cloud collaboration services that can compete. To stay in top, you should listen to customers and businesses.
Sorry to disagree, but I guess Microsoft MVPs, Microsoft product group and other influencers could take such a business scneario and see the practicality of it. It is practical since everyone else is doing it, so it is matter of how/why and when to introduce this if it make sense.
You can handle the scenario as described with a shared mailbox and Outlook.
"John, Joe, Ross and Lisa are in the same team and they have support@contoso.com email address that is assigned to shared mailbox. Ross as the team leader wants every email going to support@contoso.com to reach that shared mailbox, and want someone to declar that a specific threat will be answered by him. So Ross can come, open the shared mailbox, and see that Lisa makred a specific email communication so he knows she will handle it and so forth."
Here's an example from a shared mailbox. I used categories to mark the message as being responded by me. You can assign different categories to Lisa, Joe, Ross, and John and the different colors used for each person will clearly identify who has done what...
As to whether or not Office 365 is "old school", I don't think that you can charge Office 365 with that because it changes all the time as new functionality is introduced. The point I made is that when you sign up for a cloud service, you accept whatever functionality is delivered in the service and don't get to vote on how that functionality is delivered. It's the same with Google - they have some functionality that they have implemented that is not inside Office 365 and might never be inside Office 365, but that's no reason for saying that it should be.
TR
Thanks Tony for such discussion.
I dont think O365 is old school.I think it is the best one out there and the only one with full hybrid capabilities.
I also want to thank you for all your contribution in the community. I am following your work since a while.
Nevertheless, I hope to see the Office Group shared mailbox feature exposing at least categorization.
Thanks
+1 that groups should provide a solution to track allocation and completion of response, like Zendesk's inbox service does. I can see it's a challenge, if a message is forwarded to a personal mailbox how would the categorisation or tracking update back in the group, but we agree with the requirement. Perhaps if groups were a trigger in Flow we could then use a SharePoint list to track it's response.
In our case Shared Mailboxes aren't a simple option as we have kiosk licensed users, who are entitled to use groups but not shared mailboxes (although it seems rather grey area).
