[New!] Drag and drop conversations into groups

Microsoft

Good news! We're currently rolling out drag and drop for messages and conversations into groups in Outlook on the web first for First Release customers, then Standard release customers.

 

It's much easier to explain with a GIF:


dnd2.gif

 

Support for Outlook 2016 for Windows is coming soon--stay tuned.

 

You can find the documentation here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/24e809db-70e1-45b7-8d54-efac7951dc95

123 Replies

Nice update, it will make working with groups even easier, thanks for sharing.

Took you long enough... :)

 

Will the right-click move/copy functionality also work, or is it strictly drag&drop? Multiple items/threads? Does everything get dumped into the Inbox/Conversations folder of the Group, or can we drop Calendar items to the Calendar? The documentation is very poor on the details... :)

@Vasil Michev:


@Vasil Michev wrote:

Will the right-click move/copy functionality also work, or is it strictly drag&drop? 


At this point, it's strictly drag and drop.

 


@Vasil Michev wrote:

Multiple items/threads? 


You can drag and drop one thread at a time, or up to 100 individual messages at a time.

 


@Vasil Michev wrote:

Does everything get dumped into the Inbox/Conversations folder of the Group, or can we drop Calendar items to the Calendar? 


Yes. While you can drag-and-drop meeting invites, it will not be added to the group calendar.

Thanks. You might want to update the article above with these.

When is this coming to Outlook Desktop? By the way, nice addition :)

@Juan Carlos González Martín, you're not the only one looking for it--it is in fact coming!

 

Our engineering teams are working hard on it. I don't want to make false promises at this point, so I can't share anything more.

Thanks!! Looking forward to see this :)

Well done!

One question though, whay is it only possible to "Reply all" and not only the sender?

Tomas,


When you reply to a conversation that you have drag-and-dropped, it behaves like any other email in your group's emails, which is by default, Reply all. One thing to note is that like any other email you reply to the group, the group will in the To line.


If you want to reply only to the sender, you can pop-out the email and remove undesired recipients.



"Note: If you accidentally moved the message or conversation to the wrong group, you can forward it back to yourself and then delete the message or conversation from the group."

 

Are there any plans for a more convenient way to handle wrongly moved messages?

When will subfolders or categorization come to Group messages/conversations?  It is nice to move a message to another group, but organizing conversations is more important to our adoption.  We have teams that handle multiple projects and it would be nice to organize those conversations by project.  Subfolders or even simply being able to apply flags/categorization to a message is one of the most requested features for Groups.

When will this begin working?  I am using the OWA to try drag and drop and the option still isn't working for me.  

Marcus,

 

We're still currently in targeted release as we were making improvements. Can you confirm that you are in targeted release? If so, send me a message and we can work with you to get it working.

 

Cheers!

I don't know that we are.  We just migrated off of a GoDaddy Tenant to a Microsoft Tenant (no more third party), some of the migration didn't go so well, was hoping to use this to move email out of local PST to a new Group that has been created.



Those who are already following the group in their inbox will not receive a copy in their inbox.

This makes sharing emails in a group kind of pointless. Can you please improve the feature to insure that those other members of the group will be able to get a copy of the email.

 

We need this feature to be able to collaborate on group projects. If someone receives an email from someone outside of the group, we need them to be able to move it to the group mailbox for record keeping. Everyone needs access to be able to read these emails.

Totally agree! Really looking forward to this feature (being able to have subfolders/categorization in Groups).

Vote for it here: https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/286611-office-365-groups/suggestions/16984177-allow-users-to-...

Note: Status is set to "Working on it" but the status comment refers to dragn-n-drop... and it cannot be found in the roadmap either (https://products.office.com/en-us/business/office-365-roadmap?filters=).... so I am to looking forward to more information on when this is planned for targeted release. 

Great, except it doesn't respect the permissions assigned within a groups' 'Delivery Management' section of properties in Exchange Control Panel.  Members and even Owners of a group, who do not have rights to post (are not explicitly granted right to post through being added to "Recipients > Groups > Edit Group > Delivery Management > Accept Messages From:") to a group should not be able to drag and drop messages into a group.  Period!

 

I've confirmed that the ability to drag and drop messages from your Inbox to a group a user doesn't have access to post into is intentional behaviour through closed Office 365 Ticket #30126-7369965 . If this continues we will have to look to move away from using Outlook Groups because it will no longer meet organizational requirements with these introduced changes.

 

Thanks,

 

Matt

We really need some more features to make this useful. I can not get the "select 100 messages" and drag and drop to work. First off, when you try to select several messages using control+click, it doesn't work, you can only control+click a few at a time. Second, the drag and drop doesn't work for me for multiple messages, only one by one.

 

Now, that just explains how the current functionality doesn't work. For future functionality, we need the following:

1. Drag and drop in outlook

2. Drag and drop all messages, not just some (I have a public folder I would like to move all the contents from but currently there is no way to do this)

I would prefer that the e-mail (and following replies) conversation was not moved or copied to the group, but "made visible" to the group.

This would also make it possible to make emails associated with multiple groups.

The current architecture of groups appears to move e-mails to a group inbox, removing it from the persons inbox, adding info on the to/copy fields etc.

Currently Hiver for Gmail is architected in this way. All emails of a company resides in the employees mailboxes. Visibility BEYOND what is seen in the to/cc/bcc fields is set by the hiver database table that holds visibility permissions. Adding a tag to an e-mail makes it visible beyond what the visibility in to/cc/bcc controls.

Groups seem to handle visibility in to/cc/bcc fields, and thus copying emails into multiple "PST" storage files. I can only Imagine this also makes a lot of unneccesary data in the server. Also search appears to be complicated by this architecture.