While email has been the form of formal online communication that we have been used to for the past decade, it has come to the point now that when it comes to collaborating with teammates, the constant back and forth has made email threads unbearably long. Plus the hassle of attaching files and using up your allotted email space can be tedious. Work group messaging apps are the way to go now and Microsoft is joining the fray by introducing Outlook Groups.
If your office is dependent on the whole Microsoft ecosystem, then this would be the perfect group messaging app for you. It allows you to communicate, collaborate, share photos and notes, and all the usual things that you usually do in your messaging apps, except this is professional of course. With the app, you can create and participate in group email conversations. You can even @mention a person and a group when you’re discussing, if the thread is a bit long already.
What’s important though is collaborating on documents and files. You can view and co-author the Office documents that have been shared in your group, and edit them in real time. So no need to attach and re-attach documents and lose track of changes that have been made in Word, Excel, Powerpoint.
You can download Outlook Groups from the Google Play Store for free. While there are a lot of messaging apps out there like Slack, Basecamp, etc, this one has the added advantage of being connected to the Microsoft eco-system and we can expect more connectivity to other related products soon.
