Forum Discussion
Office 365 Groups and Categorize emails
Hi, We used to have shared mailboxes where customer support team has a shared mailbox to receive complaints, and then members of the support team use shared mailboxes and outlook categorization to assign emails to members.
Now we are trying to sell the Office 365 groups, and get advantage of the shared mailbox feature integrated on it.
But inside the Office group conversation, you can not assign categories.
This would be a killer feature. Any planes to do this? Anyone has the same need
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.
36 Replies
I agree that Office365Groups should have the same or better functions than ShareMailbox. I was thinking of not using ShareMail, recently, but because we can't categorise, set receipt remainder and use other features available with ShareMailbox, we want to be.
Sorry, IT people, just because you don't use or think they are not required does not mean that they are not relevant or useful to other people.
- We have developed an extension for Outlook that makes collaboration and using Outlook as a help desk much easier. Our extension can synchronize shared categories for all group members. In addition, our extensions can track if emails are open or closed and add internal notes to emails. If you're interested, you can learn more at https://sbx.tools/
- I do need that. Actually I thought it already existed per documentation of the ReplyPost action on Power Automate. I was going to use it (but I can't because it is not working) to have a Power Automate Flow that monitors a Group Mail and take specific action (sorry, would take) depending on the post category.
You'll see my scenario: A small team within the company can review the posts received by our partners and some of those posts may trigger a Power Automate Flow and it would actually write back by adding a new post under the same thread, but... in order for the Flow to not trigger itself with its own message I thought of making use of the categories to sort of flag its own posts as "Automated Feedback" and stop an auto-trigger.
What is funny is that the API to reply a Group Mail Post has a field to set a Category (or a set of Categories, which sounds even better), but... it just doesn't work.- Hi armandogarcia,
could you ask a question regarding your flow in https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Power-Automate/bd-p/MPAForum ?
I'll try to help.
I know this is an old chain but I looked through the responses. This is definitely a need in our Organization. We have battled this back and forth. Unified Group vs. Shared Mail box. Which should be used for the scenario where you have external parties or internal parties sending email to a help type queue and you want people to review those requests, deal with them and then once those tasks are completed file them away?
Our problem with Shared Mail boxes is supportability. Microsoft has made Unified Groups so wonderfully self-service. We love this, we want more of this (as Admin's and end users). Shared Mailboxes are NOT self-service and rely heavily on someone somewhere to create them and to help end users manage the permissions. This is why we are trending more and more to trying to use Unified Groups for the function of Shared Mailboxes. Sure, Unified Groups has a bunch of other features we don't really want or need in this particular scenario (although we love them in the other scenarios), but we love the fact the end users can provision them themselves, we can set owners on the Unified groups (no place for documenting this on Shared Mailboxes unless you just make some notes or assume ALL those who have access are the specific and responsible owners). Also, coming soon, we really really love that Unified Groups will have their own management lifecycle and delete themselves if they are not being used as long as there are owners setup. Shared Mailboxes have none of this. The only downside to using a Unified group is the Mailbox itself. If I could just find a better way to assign these emails to particular users to deal with and then once the email have been dealt with to use Flow, or PowerApps to scoop them up and move them to the attached library of the Group, or some other handy solution, we would be in heaven. I want to stop using Shared mailboxes. I don't see the point.
BTW, this article might be of interest to you: https://practical365.com/blog/exchange-shared-mailboxes-help-desk-customer-support/
To be honest, I see no appetite within Microsoft to further enhance shared mailboxes (but it would be really nice to make them available on mobile devices...). All of the effort is being poured into group mailboxes. However, don't forget that you can use PowerShell to automate the creation and management of shared mailboxes to some degree and perhaps enough for you to get what you need. For example, you could allow someone to request a new shared mailbox and script the creation of the mailbox, assignment of permissions, and even generate a little message to say when the mailbox is ready for use. PowerShell is always there when Microsoft doesn't care...
I want to be able to connect a speficic email with a specific Group or Conversation within Teams. I don't believe this integration exists, unless someone can correct me?
you might be able to write some custom code using the Microsoft Graph API to do what you want, but this functionality (as I understand it) is not availabe OOTB. Maybe you should state the business driver for such a feature and how it would be used so that the developers who read these forums understand what you need...
We created a custom addin for a customer that provides the category feature. We did extend the schema using MS Graph. We also looked at using the Planner buckets as categories since this creates the "ToDos" for the groups too. Both are possible in our work.
MS Graph is a fabulous way to interact with all the new features in Office 365 and related apps.
We have decided to focus on creating these custom apps for customers making the journey to Office 365. In this way, we can fill in the functionality needed for the customer to make the switch when a compelling business case exists.
I am happy to discuss our findings on this approach with anyone who is considering this road. You can schedule an online session with me using our https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/DeCarloSoftware2@decarlosoftware.com/bookings/ or contact me directly 412-945-0063
I know this is thread is a bit stale, but I want to weigh in here. I agree this would be a killer feature.
The ability to use a link (url) to the conversation in other programs is very powerful. But for that to work elegantly, you also need the ability to groom your Conversation "Inbox". By applying categories, you could Group By, View/Hide, Assign Rules/Flows, etc.
That would be extremely powerful and dramatically increase user adoption... which is currently very poor.
We can set auto reply for Shared mailbox. Is there auto reply for Office 365 group?
Unfortunately, the Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration cmdlet does not work with a group mailbox, so no.
So Office 365 group cannot replace Shared mailbox in case which user need auto reply.
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.
- Hi i have to say that it is not abiut what is offered on Office 365 but what people need and what enterprises need.
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.
The shortcomings of Groups when used as replacement for shared mailboxes have been discussed numerous times, most recently here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Groups/Is-there-a-quot-Sent-quot-folder-for-an-O365-Group-Conversation/m-p/33107#M1478
Make sure to leave your business reasoning and feedback here or on the other thread so that the team can potentially plan for some of the missing features.
