Shared account: can I use Planner to assign task?

[Stefano Conti]

Hi friends,

in our little tenant (5 people in total) all emails arrive in info@mycompany.it.

We are consultant and most questions require answers in short time.

We all have private accounts, but we have been asked to receive and send email exclusively via info@mycompany.it

Actually info@mycompany.it is NOT a shared mailbox. it's just a E1 license to which we all have signed in with the same credentials, and thus we are all owner at the same time.

We use it also as an archive of our job (via folders and subfolders).

When an email arrives, any colleague can "flag" (=categorize) it with own colour... but the situation is a little bit confusing since any colleague can delete/move email away or "de-categorize" them.

I'm looking for a workaround to fix this.

Furthermore our boss would like to assign or co-assign task (=task intended as an email request) and monitor it.

My question is if planner could help us.

We are open to evaluate an evolution of our internat organization, but the first problem will be how to manage all past question and answers we provide via mail that now are archived in info@mycompany.it

Thanks for any idea !!

Stefano

[#2]

I think Planner could be a solution for you, but not a perfect solution so I recommend you to run a pilot to see if Planner fits your requirements. Basically Planner will provide to you the following:
(1) Task assignment to Planner Members and the ability to assign a single Task to more than one Planner Member
(2) Planner is built on top of Office 365 Groups so you will have a Groups MailBox to receive any communication sent to the Group and if configured properly also Group members will receive a copy of the e-mail messages sent to the Group

[#3]

My suggestion would be to use Microsoft Flow along with Planner as you receive most of the tasks via email. You can set a Flow to create a task in Planner when users flag it from mailboxes. 

[#4]

thank you @Juan Carlos González Martín.

If I understood well your solution covers part of my problem.

Any suggestion on how to manage sent mails that should be archived ?

May I ask you what kind of solution you/your company adopted to manage daily email workflow ?

Shared mailbox ?

Thanks.

stefano

[#5]

thank you @Santhosh Balakrishnan

Interesting.

Is MS flow applicable to a shared account ?

Stefano

[#6]

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@Santhosh Balakrishnan wrote:

My suggestion would be to use Microsoft Flow along with Planner as you receive most of the tasks via email. You can set a Flow to create a task in Planner when users flag it from mailboxes. 

---

Thanks but the scenario is a little bit complicated, we have 1/2 boss that asked to be able to assign task to others. I dont' understand it it is possible with your solution, since outlook I'm not sure can understand WHO flag an email....

In other words:

- Any user (also the boss) can pick a non-assigned email and assign it to himself

- The boss should be able to:

• assign or co-aasign non-assigned email
• de-assign previous assigned email
• monitor the progress of all task, prioritize some etcc..

thanks for any suggestions

stefano

[#7]

If this is a support team then I'd suggest a proper ticket management system like ZenDesk or HelpScout would be a better fit. If it's a sales team then a proper CRM would also work better. Shared mailboxes are not well suited to this type of task assignment and management, tracking, etc.

[#8]

I agree with @Paul Cunningham. It sounds like you have a support or Service Desk, and there are no shortage of products that would help you ... but planner/outlook is not the best combination.

You should indeed consider a help desk system, like Paul recommended.  It would do everything that you asked for, including the ability to track who assigned, responded or moved a message.

If price is an  issue there are a number of free or low cost options:

1. In our office we have used  Support Center Plus from Manage Engine (hosted on a VPS)

2. Zoho Desk has free, but feature limited option

3. FreshDesk, similarly, has a feature limited option that is free for 3 users

4. Teamwork Desk - my recommendation - is $20/full agent, but allows free "lite" agents for those that reply to less than 10 tickets per month (like a supervisor), so you may not need to pay for all your users.

Hope this helps. 

Luis 

[#9]

Hi Stefano, I my opinion we have used Microosft Planner to manage support tickets we receive via email which saved us a lot of time involved in implementation and training. Moreover I like Planner because it is available in Office 365 ecosystem.  Below is the write up which explains how we leverage Planner to manage tickets. 

We receive support tickets from end users via email and create task for each ticket with unique task name for each task with the original email along with documents attached in email to tasks and assign it to respective support engineer. In this process we have created 6 buckets to group the tasks. The support engineer will then reassigns it to concern product manager if needed. Once the product team worked on this the status will be changed to completed and reassign it to support engineer and task will be kept in same bucket. Support engineer will then respond to customer and move task to next bucket. Once the customer responds the task will be marked as completed and moved to Closed tickets bucket. There are some cases in which we need follow up with customer and those will be moved to separate bucket. We have used tags to mark the product name the task is related to. Comments section in each ticket helped us a lot to review the details as well as the tasks assignment. We have used Office 365 Groups search capability to find the related tickets for a customer.
We use 'Group by' option to track the status of tickets. As we have given unique task name for each task it becomes simple for us to track the status for each ticket. Also 'Planner Hub' helped here to find the Tickets that are overdue.

Hope this helps. 

-Santhosh. 

[#10]

Hi Stefano, I my opinion we have used Microosft Planner to manage support tickets we receive via email which saved us a lot of time involved in implementation and training. Moreover I like Planner because it is available in Office 365 ecosystem.  Below is the write up which explains how we leverage Planner to manage tickets. 

We receive support tickets from end users via email and create task for each ticket with unique task name for each task with the original email along with documents attached in email to tasks and assign it to respective support engineer. In this process we have created 6 buckets to group the tasks. The support engineer will then reassigns it to concern product manager if needed. Once the product team worked on this the status will be changed to completed and reassign it to support engineer and task will be kept in same bucket. Support engineer will then respond to customer and move task to next bucket. Once the customer responds the task will be marked as completed and moved to Closed tickets bucket. There are some cases in which we need follow up with customer and those will be moved to separate bucket. We have used tags to mark the product name the task is related to. Comments section in each ticket helped us a lot to review the details as well as the tasks assignment. We have used Office 365 Groups search capability to find the related tickets for a customer.
We use 'Group by' option to track the status of tickets. As we have given unique task name for each task it becomes simple for us to track the status for each ticket. Also 'Planner Hub' helped here to find the Tickets that are overdue.

Hope this helps. 

-Santhosh.