Introducing groups in Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android

[Krish Gali]

We are very excited to announce that we are rolling out groups experiences in Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android. When available on your device, you can -

• View your group list.
• Read and reply to group conversations.
• Add group events to your personal calendar.
• View unread messages sent to the group.
• View group details within the group card (Outlook for iOS and Android only).

We are working on quick iterations and additional functionality in the upcoming months, so stay tuned. More information here - https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/18/introducing-groups-in-outlook-for-mac-ios-and-android/.

Thanks,

Krish

[#2]

Hi Geoffrey,
Are you connected as a volume license user? Currently, groups feature is not supported in volume license versions of Mac Outlook.
-Maria

[#3]

Ah, yes that's exactly it. How is that determined? The source for the Office suite installer or the tenant license?

[#4]

Answered my own question with a bare bones machine and a clean install from the cloud.

So, when will volume license versions support this feature? Obviously we have an imaging workflow that relies on that.

[#5]

We're working on bringing Groups into Outlook Mac client with volume license. But at this point it is hard to give a more concrete timeline.

[#6]

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@Brent Ellis wrote:
I personally use it, but most of our users use the built-in email clients as it is what they are familiar with/comfortable with. So we have never forced them to move into the tool. I'm afraid Microsoft is making that decision for us.

I'm a big fan of the stand alone Groups app, and personally didn't see a need to shove it into Outlook. I view it as a lightweight competitor to Teams, and thus worthy of its own interface. If you wanted to communicate in Outlook, you could just subscribe and do it via email.

---

I agree, I liked the stand alone app. It allowed people not to have to use outlook (which is the slowest email client I have used on mobile). The problem I have always had is that groups does not allow a user to log in with multiple accounts.  For now the integration into the outlook app seems to correct that.  Although it is a pain to get to the groups in outlook.

[#7]

The Groups, if we share a document in Onedrive within Groups with a user, that same user logs into the OneDrive app on iPhone and does not see the shared document. do you know why this is the case?

[#8]

I don't think the OneDrive app looks at group membership to build the list of shared documents. If it did, that would be quite a list. Think of all the documents that are shared with a group. Potentially thousands for just one group. Listing all those documents shared with you via group membership would obfuscate the documents shared specifically with you. 

[#9]

Is this for Government Tenants as well? G3 specifically.

[#10]

this option is available with the Groups App, i don't see why they couldn't embedded a link to those shared documents in the OneDrvie app.

[#11]

We are working on making access to groups in Outlook mobile easier. Stay tuned for more updates on this. 

[#12]

Hi Anthony, We are working on the best way to bring files shared with a group to Outlook Mobile. We will update once we have more to share. 

[#13]

Hi Maria,

Could you please advise how I could check to see whether I am able to use Groups in Office 365 (for Mac)? Reading the thread, it seems as though I should have the correct licence but I can't see it.

Thank you!

Rachelle

[#14]

We've seen the Groups experience come and go in Outlook for Mac installs that have the correct licensing. We built three machines with a non-volume license and two of them still have the correct license but the Groups cog vanished overnight. Weird.

On the remianing machine the list of groups presented is incomplete and we can't tell how it decides what to show.

[#15]

Hi Rachelle,
You can check whether you're using O365 license here (Outlook > About Outlook). Groups is currently not supported for volume license.

[#16]

Hi Geoffrey, 

Could you please file a ticket so we can get the logs and investigate on why your team's groups have vanished (Help > Contact Support)?

Regarding the list of groups being incomplete, we are currently showing up to 10 groups that are most active. We are working to show all groups that you're member of in Mac Outlook. We will update once we have more to share. 

[#17]

Adding new functionality is pretty pointless when some users can't even get logged into the Outlook for Android/iOS app.

[#18]

Hi Cary,
Could you provide us with more details on this issue so we can look into it? Are you unable to log in using Outlook mobile app? If so, I'll send you a private message to get your account email address and we can start looking into this.
Thank you

[#19]

Correct, can't setup an account in Outlook for Android or iOS.

EWSEnabled is true for the accounts that I've been trying.

[#20]

Any update on this? 

[#21]

Regarding the issue where the account could not be set up in Outlook iOS/Android app, our mobile app currently does not support accounts under private azure clouds.