Forum Discussion
MicrosoftNew feature: Introducing a new file experience for groups in Outlook on the web
Today, we've announced a new file experience for groups in Outlook on the web. People frequently rely on email to edit and share documents with their teams, and this new experience makes it easier to collaborate on documents in Outlook on the web. This feature is available to all First Release tenants.
Please try it out and give us feedback.
41 Replies
Hello,
I am unable to see "Edit and reply" option if i go to "Files" tab. I am trying this from Web interface. Am i missing something?
Thanks
- Hi Shweta,
If you want to edit and reply to an attachment shared with the group, you will first need to open the attachment and from the preview you can perform "Edit and reply" action. You will not see an Edit and Reply option in the group files view.
Find out more about viewing and editing attachments in OWA(not specific to Group files view) here:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/View-and-edit-an-attachment-in-Outlook-Web-App-E36B3369-5141-4367-B276-85547E1DA18D#bkmk_editingattachments Reply is an email operation. What do you want to do with the Files?
- I want to perform in place edit for attachments which comes in email. I saw in some link that MS has released “Edit and Reply” feature for attachments which is displayed in files Tab. But I am unable to get this feature in my web mail
- So with this upgrade it looks like it has removed the ability to stop inherit rights on a folder and then to remove any of the default groups (Share Members & Share Visitors)? This was a nice feature as we used it to replace network drives on local servers. Occasionally we would have a folder in the group that we needed to make private by removing the members and visitors and then just added the few users that needed access.
- cfiessinger
Austin please this post about recent SharePoint specific updates: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/UPDATE-Create-Office-365-Groups-with-team-sites-from-SharePoint/m-p/48277
How come you can't create a new OneNote file from the Files area?
I do think it's confusing to have Files and Site. Makes it seem like documents are in mulitple locations even if they aren't. Overall I'm really struggling with group navigation. In and out of Outlook is confusing in my opionion. I keep expecting the same top navigation no matter where I am and it's different depending on if I'm in sites or Outlook. I really think getting the top nav to be consistent would be a real win.
My take on the new Files "experience" for Office 365 Groups. It's all very nice because attachments emailed to members in group conversations are now surfaced, perhaps in a vain attempt to persuade people to use cloudy attachments, but the downside is that extra clicks are required to access a document library. Which is bad. I'd like to see the option to retain the old behavior. https://www.petri.com/new-files-experience-office-365-groups
Just one click away, the "Browse library" button will load the standard document library view. Email attachments are tucked away in a folder with the same name. Would it help to have the reverse? Start with the standard doc library view, and have the Activity view with the other views under the All Documents button?
As I have said elsewhere, it takes more than one click if you have a document library with folders and need to get to one of the folders. In the old setup, you clicked Files and were brought to the folder that you were last working in. Now it takes three.
But the more important point is that Microsoft should not introduce change of this nature without giving users the option to retain the previous arrangement. After all, some people have been working with Files using "the old way" for 2 years... and it's not right to force a new method down our throats without a by-your-leave. Hence the requirement to provide users with the option to access Files using the classic method.
Speaking of bugs, after the rollout of this new feature, I now see two versions of the same file: one is the latest and the other is a previous one!
- cfiessingerSalvatore, can you please navigate to SharePoint and look in the "Email Attachment" folder and see if you have your file there? When you select "Edit & Reply" we store a copy in that folder as explains in this article: http://aka.ms/groupfiles
The duplicate file in the group visualization is "Documento prova gruppo.docx", which is marked as "Modificato" in two different dates. It is not an attachment. In SharePoint instead it is (correctly present) only once.
Definitely a bug in the new visualization, IMHO.
- Great effort and it looks great. One nice add-in would be allow sorting of columns. Guess it is currently sorted by date and would be nice if sorting of other columns is allowed as in doc library.
Positive feedback from my business user colleagues... I just left a typical Thursday morning business meeting that had nothing to do with this update and I overheard my colleague from our Marketing department giving a demo of this change to three other colleagues. This impromptu demo quickly spread to all 15 attendees and consumed the first half of the meeting. By the end of the impromptu demo, my colleagues were praising how helpful this will be and how much time this can save them during a typical work day. They love that they can simply stay inside their inbox and complete quick tasks in their documents "in-the-moment" - one less thing to remember to do later. They mentioned they would typically set aside emails requiring some sort of document activity and come back to it later.
This is one of those updates which resonates with the general business users because it removes that question of "what to use when". It simply brings a common daily business task right in their inbox - the simple things matter. Well done Microsoft and looking forward to what comes next.
Next up for me - how to keep meetings on-topic!
Chad Johnston
- cfiessingerThank you Chad for the positive feedback, glad to see your colleagues are finding value, more to come on that journey to make email and files collaboration awesome. Have a great day and thank all your colleagues on behalf of the team in Redmond that worked hard on this feature.
Great integrative feature!
Two gripes I have straight away:
- "Activity" shows the last action for SharePoint files (e.g. modified/uploaded) but shows "E-Mail subject" for e-mailed files. Two different types of information in the same column. Also: I don't really care about the last activity, do I? I mean "Modified" doesn't even mean that the file was modified since the last time I saw it, so it is not really of use to me.
- The Save to group library / Edit and reply are almost the same and produce weird results - bear with me:
- I e-mailed the file "TestFile.docx" to the group. The file shows up in Files. Awesome!
- I like my files at one place so I "Save to group library". Awesome!
- I now have two "TestFile.docx" under files. One from the mail, one in SharePoint. A non technical user doesn't know this as I only have Activity=Uploaded and Activity="Testfile" (my mail subject)
- Somebody else sees the initial file and open it.
- He clicks on "Edit and reply". Another version is created in SharePoint. I now have "TestFile1.docx"
So I now have three TestFiles as seen in the screenshot attached to the post - a user wouldn't know what to do with this.
- cfiessingerDennis thanks for the taking the time to test this out. At this stage this is by design: we do not remove the "classic" attachment in the first email and only keep a copy in SP and hence showing two rows each pointing to two different file. What you type of behavior would you like to see in the future?
cfiessinger, you asked so you'll get more feedback.
The new file experience is great in principle. A unified view is exactly what is needed to un-confuse users where files actually are. It makes things quicker to access and uncomplicates things. I see the following problems in the current implementation:
- Reinventing the wheel in terms of unification
- Microsoft Teams has a unified file experience across all teams and OneDrive
- Reinventing the wheel in terms of user experience
- Again Microsoft Teams has a unique file experience
- OneDrive & SharePoint just got a UI overhaul including re-usable components (looking at you SharePoint Framework & Office UI Fabric), yet the groups file experience seem to be yet another implementation of "files in a list"
- The unification is not consistent as outlined by me and others in this thread
I would advise improving the current implementation like so:
- Create one true file experience. Office UI Fabric should lead the way. Use that experience in Teams as well as in Groups. Don't let everybody see that you work in different product groups and there is no communication between those product groups. Users will thank you by understanding "ahhh this is the way Microsoft wants me to work with files" and not having to relearn everything for every application
- If you want to aggregate files from different sources into one view, there must be one master ("the one to rule them all")
- Imagine this flow:
- A file comes into the group via e-mail --> It's the master file, not editable.
- I move the file into the connected Team site --> (thinking in OneDrive/SharePoint) the master file gets updadated to link to SharePoint/OneDrive in the version history you can see the file came from an e-mail
- I go back to the initial mail and open the file from there and edit it --> I am not editing yet another copy from E-Mail attachments, I am editing the master file created earlier!
- If the user wants to create a copy of the file via SharePoint - fine, let him do this. This is now another master file. You shouldn't create copies besides the initial "working copy"
- The activity column is still valid, but should be renamed "Last activity" to know what happened with the file last. "Activity" implies that this is currently going on or I could click on this activity and do something with it.
- Imagine this flow:
So basically my two gripes are about the UI being yet-anther-file-UI and the experience making managing files actually more confusing for the end user.
- Use an existing file UI and/or implement that UI everywhere (Groups, Teams, OneDrive/SharePoint).
- Re-Think the aggregation/unification of multiple sources and use existing concepts like file versions and have one master file.
- Reinventing the wheel in terms of unification
A follow up:
- I deleted both TestFiles from SharePoint (they're also removed from Files. Great!)
- I now have two files in Files: TestFile.docx (from the initial mail) and TestFile(2).docx which is "Shared" according to the Activity. Also the date is 8 hours ago?!
Something seems wrong here. As before, see attached screenshot.
- Will the "edit permissions" option be made available from this interface? I don't seem to see those anywhere. Or will you just have to go to the Shared Documents library via SharePoint to access those options?
- cfiessingerBrent you will need to leverage the SharePoint doclib for this
Ey Dennis Gaida , really in depth test of this new feature.. cfiessinger it seems there are some bugs over there...
