Integrating Microsoft Lists with Microsoft Outlook, Office and Teams

Microsoft Lists is a powerful app that lets you manage processes and workflows. It lets you collect, view, filter, sort, collaborate and share structured information across status, lifecycle, ownership, and more. Integrating these lists with Outlook, Office, and Teams can help your workers become far more productive and effective, facilitating deeper collaboration and faster project completion.

Integrating Lists with Outlook, Office, and Teams with Ideagen Mail Manager lets users work with Lists more effectively and without toggling between different applications. Instead, they can access Lists from any of these apps, to insert, browse, and search. They can set favourite Lists and recent Lists, and access reports of Lists to manage items more effectively.

Ideagen Mail Manager extends the benefits of Microsoft Lists by providing one-click integration with Outlook, Office, and Teams for all your Lists. 

What is Lists

Microsoft Lists is a rebrand of the pre-existing SharePoint Lists. It's been modernised to centralise the List experience and includes templates that can be expanded, or you can create your own list from scratch. Lists can be shared in any SharePoint site and you can set rules-based alerts that automatically notify people when something on a list that's relevant to them requires action.

Lists use metadata so you can view the information in meaningful, contextual ways. You can use Lists to track issues, onboarding, events, assets, travel, work progress, and more. You can also view lists in the ways that work for you, such as in card and calendar views as well as standard list views. The Lists experience has been expanded The Lists experience has been expanded

How it works

Your List items frequently come from emails or attachments. For example, if you're tracking issues related to a project, a colleague may email you with updates or additional issues to add to the List. To do this, you'd normally need to get out of Microsoft Outlook and into SharePoint. Then, you need to navigate to the relevant List, click on that List, and create a new item. You would need to either type in or copy and paste the details from the email to create your new List item.

If you have an email or attachment that you want to associate with that List item, you would need to save it to the desktop (or another location) first, then upload it to your List.

This is a manual process that can be time-consuming and error-prone. In the best-case scenario, it takes time out of people's days and makes them less productive. In the worst-case scenario, people neglect to keep Lists updated, making your Lists outdated and not useful for managing projects.

How Ideagen Mail Manager can help

Instead of manually adding new List items or updating existing items, Ideagen Mail Manager lets you create and add to List items directly from Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe, or the Windows Desktop.

Users literally drag and drop the relevant email to the appropriate project List without ever leaving the Outlook user interface. Rather than toggling between screens, this process lets users add all the same information that they could have added manually through the SharePoint interface. However, this approach means you don't have to switch screens; instead, you can now enter all the relevant information right there in Outlook.

Importantly, adding to the List in this way automatically saves the email message to that List item, which means you didn't have to manually save attachments or emails, then upload them to Lists.

This also works the other way around; if you're working within SharePoint and open an email that has been saved into a List, you can click on the email within SharePoint, which automatically opens it in Outlook so you can reply to or forward the email seamlessly.

This streamlined process delivers five key time-saving and productivity benefits:

1. Email attributes, attachments, and other information is saved automatically, which dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to comprehensively update or add to Lists.
2. Lists are saved with metadata and the email discussion attached, making all content available in one place and letting users get on with the task that has been assigned to them rather than spend time figuring out what they need to do.
3. The ability to create a folder for each issue, then create items within that folder during the save process saves time and money.
4. List locations can be pinned like any other location type and are added to the Recent menu, making it faster and easier to find the correct List from Outlook, Office, and Teams.
5. If email columns are available in the list, Ideagen Mail Manager automatically captures email metadata to those columns, making searching for information even more effective.

Email is most often the trigger for creating new List items. Ideagen Mail Manager makes that process simple, fast, and functional by integrating SharePoint Lists with Outlook, Office, and Teams.

Get more information

Using Ideagen Mail Manager, Lists are now part of the apps you use every day, letting you become more productive and collaborative. This is increasingly important in distributed workforces to make collaboration and project management even easier than it would be if everyone were working in the same office.