Microsoft says that over ten million people use its Groups feature in Outlook every month - and that number looks set to grow considerably, as the company has expanded its availability to three new platforms.
"Groups in Outlook offers huge improvements over traditional distribution lists", Microsoft explained, "with a shared space for group conversations, calendars, files and notebooks, the convenience of self-service membership and much more". So far, that functionality has only been available in Outlook for Windows and on the web, but from today, it's also rolling out to Outlook for Mac, iOS, and Android.
If you use Outlook on one of those operating systems, you'll now be able to:
- 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).
Microsoft also highlighted recent improvements and additions to Groups in Outlook on other platforms:
Give guest access—Last fall, we updated Outlook on the web to give you the ability to set up guest access for people outside your organization, set group classification as defined by Office 365 admins, and view usage guidelines. Now, these same capabilities are available in Outlook for Windows.
Invite people to join—One of our most requested improvements was an easier way to invite multiple people to join a group. We’ve released the Invite to join feature to Outlook on the web, which lets you create invitation links and share them with others via email or other channels, giving them a quick way to join the group.
Multi-delete conversations—Group owners can now multi-select conversations and delete them from the group conversations space in Outlook for Windows.
Send email as a group—Office 365 admins can grant send-as and send-on-behalf-of permissions to members of a group using the Exchange admin center. Group members who have these permissions can then send emails as the group, or on behalf of the group, from Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web.
More functionality is on the way, too. Microsoft said that it's now working on allowing users to add appointments to a group calendar in Outlook for Windows, and to "easily add Mail Contacts in your company's directory as a guest in a group".
Source: Office Blogs
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