"collaborative inbox" (like Gmail)

Brass Contributor

Hi all

On you tube i saw some videos showing this tool.

Seems interisting, or better .. absolute vital for small offices.

Is there a way to reproduce this - today - in outlook with exchange online/O365 ?

tks, stefano

 

6 Replies

Have you explored Outlook Groups? That's pretty much what it's for. There's a lot of information about what groups are and how they work in this forum.

 

For instance, you could set up a Group called 'Office Collaboration' or 'Shared Inbox' or whatever and have everyone in your office as members of that Group.  You will then have an email address called 'officecollaboration@yourcompny.net' that you can send messages to, a special Group experience accessible from Outlook to see any and all messages sent to/from that Group; a file site for all documents attached to such messages and any other documents that any group member wants to upload; a Group calendar; a Group OneNote; a Group Planner.  All accessible from WITHIN Outlook by clicking on the Group name in the elft panel.

Hello Chris, thanks for your feedback.
yes, I know the new microsoft groups (we all haveO365), which I think is a clever solution for building working groups dedicated to projects or initiatives not too complicated.


But honestly they do not seem suited to handle the job everyday....:

We are a national association and do consulting activities/services to our associated companies.
Every day we receive many emails from both associated companies and other customers.

Many relate to simple questions, while others need further attention to provide a complete answer.
There is rarely a need to build a real working group.
So we must find an intelligent system to ensure that:


- All employees can have access to a shared inbox (at the moment not set up yet)
- Anyone can take charge of an email, in this case he/she became the owner of the task and is in charge of it.
- no incoming email left behind and thus with no follow-up
- Remain track of the work done by employee
- The manager can change the assignment work

- Archive the practice. and possibility to access past email to study
- and so on.
Seen in this way, it seems a ticketing system. However, the "collaborative inbox" google to me just do that !
I think MS has tool and solution for all but not for simple things !! :)

 

Among other things we are still looking for guidelines, or suggestions, to set up a "smart" configuration of our accounts, in order to collaborate SIMPLE between us. Possible that nobody has this kind of problem and the only way to collaborate is to send email to all in CC ? Smiley Frustrated
Thanks for any advice you want to give us.

Stefano

Thats exactly what we need also.
We are 15000 employees with offices all around the globe.
The only thing people want is what you described.
Emails coming to shared email space and manager can assign emails as tasks or to people.
We used to use categorization for shared mailboxes to simulate assigning tasks with each category mapped to team member but even that is not available in office groups!

Dont get me wrong.. I love office groups as IT PRO but normal people, business people need ability to assign emails or label them so that no email is left unanswered.

Hi,

 

 I know this is an old thread and I am asking the same questions.

 

I don’t want to use 3rd party collaborative emil solution like Front, etc, or ticketing solution like Jira, etc. As Stefano mentioned I would like to find a way to track Customer Service Department email productivity and also I want to make sure to not have 3 agents working the same emails from the same clients.

 

So, did I miss something since 2016? Lol

 

That's exactly what we are looking for as well.

Anyone from Microsoft team can provide any news or insight regarding such function? Thanks!

Outlook still does not offer an efficient way to manage a team inbox. We think that in many cases using a standalone ticketing or collaboration solution is unnecessarily complicated. Thus, we decided to develop an extension for Outlook to simplify teamwork. In particular, delegating emails and keeping track of which emails are resolved and which are unresolved is quite difficult with standard Outlook tools, as such, our main focus has been on making emails easily assignable and delegable and tracking resolved emails. If you are interested, you can learn more at https://sbx.tools/