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Reviews
Outlook Groups, Office
Planner, and Delve
There are more collaboration
options: Outlook Groups, Office
Planner, and Delve. If you’re a typical
Outlook user, your left rail in Outlook
will already be full of various
folders: Sent Items, Deleted Items,
Important, and many more. At the
bottom, Outlook now adds Groups.
Groups can represent an
ad-hoc team formed to hammer
out a feature request, an entire
sales organisation, or anything in
between. In previous versions of
Office, you could create an email
alias, such as ‘West Coast Edit’, that
stood in for this. But with Groups,
you can create a shared calendar
and OneDrive, then track the
progress of various group projects
via the Planning Hub.
It’s not immediately obvious how
to form a Group. We right-clicked
the Group label to form one. (An
administrator can also take care
of this for you.) Outlook asks you
to create a group name, and at
least in our organisation, assigned
it its own email address. For now,
much of this takes place at Outlook.
com, in a web browser. Using it via
Chrome gave us some problems,
but Edge worked fine.
In general, we like Groups, if
managed appropriately. Microsoft
put some thought into how Groups
messages are passed, allowing you
to send in-Group email (known as
Conversations) into your general
Outlook inbox – or in its own
workflow. Outlook already offers
a number of ways to connect with
contacts, via messaging Skype,
email, or phone. Some people
want to see all that communication
in a single, unified interface;
others want to break it out into
discrete conversations. Groups
allows you to do both.
As you and your teammates plan
and move forward on your various
projects, Delve and Outlook’s Office
Planner help manage the effort.
Both are (or will be) web apps,
available from the Office menu in
the upper corner of Office365.com.
Delve is sort of an odd fusion of
OneDrive and Lync. One portion of
it is devoted to surfacing relevant
documents that you know are buried
somewhere in your Outlook folders,
while the other will show you more
information about a particular
colleague, such as her CV and
where she sits in the organisational
hierarchy. (If you open a contact
card in Outlook and view the
SharePoint profile, it will open this
Delve page.) We couldn’t care less
about where a colleague went to
school. But in our own workflow,
Delve automatically shows us the
documents we use most frequently.
We’re torn on Delve’s usefulness.
We think that there’s a case to be
made that if it needs to exist, then
something in modern business (or
in Office) is broken. Delve does find
documents we need, and we like
that, but it also displayed a flurry
of test documents we had created
and will never use again. Not so
great. And we don’t understand
the concept of the standalone
Delve mobile app – we can surface
relevant documents, but we have
to go to another app to contact
people about them? Finally, Delve is
also only good for finding attached
documents – if a colleague dropped
a critical bit of information into an
email, you’re out of luck.
Microsoft also showed us a web
app that will ship a bit later: the
Outlook Office Planner. Eventually,
Office Planner will be one of the
options that you can access from the
‘waffle’ menu in the upper righthand
corner of Office365.com, along with
web app versions of Outlook, Word,
Excel, OneNote, Delve and more. In
the preview build we were given, we
had to navigate there from a fake
email sent to our demo persona.
Office Planner is Microsoft’s
entry into simplified, collaborative
project management. Its cardbased
format reminded us a bit of
Trello, although the functionality is
probably closer to Zoho Projects.
Visually, it’s a stunner. On our
Surface, we were able to create
tasks, assign them to individuals to
be due on a given date, and upload
any files or links that would be
relevant to the task at hand. We
didn’t see a way to file a given task
to a superior, though, or to apply
any sort of metrics as to how well
it performed.
Office Planner does provide a
bright, informative set of ‘charts’
that actually tracks the status of
each project by task. Click on each
category to drill down to the specific
task at hand. A bar chart also allows
you to see the number of tasks each
individual has assigned to them,
a nice way to ensure the available
resources are used correctly. There
doesn’t seem to be any limit to
the number of projects that can
be managed at a given time, and
Office Planner is free with Office
2016, versus the monthly fee other
services charge.
It’s not immediately apparent
how you connect Office Planner
with Outlook; as it turns out,
adding a task in the Office Planner
sends an email to Outlook with
the assignment. And, of course,
there’s a complete lack of mobile
app integration for Office Planner
at the moment, a shortcoming
Microsoft will have to quickly rectify
to compete in this space.
Many of the other applications
within Office integrate quite closely
with Skype for Business, the app
that essentially replaced Lync in
2014. Office Planner doesn’t. In fact,
there doesn’t seem to be any way to
connect with someone involved with
a task except for email. Skype offers
you a nice, clean interface to chat
with a colleague, share files, and
even share your screen (although
this feature lagged a bit when
we were chatting with Microsoft
This took me just
a few minutes to
create, and it looks
great. But there’s
a formality to it,
too. You’d probably
still want to use
Facebook or a social
network to plan
a lunch outing,
while Groups works
better in a business
environment
February 2016 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews 61