Recently announced, hot off the press, Office 365 Groups are coming to Outlook 2016 for Mac! More about this and what the scope of this release is yonder on the blog on 2 March 2017 titled “.” Caveat, this is by way of the Insider builds fast ring at the moment, so if you’re a corporate user and you’re wondering where this is, give it sometime and keep on accessing groups through either a Windows VM in your favorite hypervisor on Mac (whether that be Parallels, VirtualBox or VMWare Fusion) or through Safari / Chrome / Firefox.
What does this look like you ask? Pretty standard. If you’re used to the web view then you’re probably familiar with something that looks a little more like this: The interactions with the UI are pretty decent. The caveat is that within the Outlook for Mac 2016 UI, you don’t have the ability to “easily” create a new thread in that discussion unless you go and create a new message and then lookup the discussion list name whereas in the Web UI you merely click on “New”. Of course the other thing to make note of is that since Groups make use of distribution lists, if within the Outlook for Mac client you click on “Reply” you’ll notice that you’re sending a note directly back to the original poster rather than a note to the entire group, thereby segmenting your conversation.
Office 365 Groups, which lets people create public or private groups, was introduced last year for Office 365 commercial and education customers. In Outlook 2016, creating and joining a group is easy, and each group member can participate in conversations, schedule meetings, share files and notes, and do Skype for Business voice and video calls.