Today I got a request from a Marketing department to solve a problem in Office365 contact list. They have this one list with 2-3 thousand contacts from multiple companies, and contacts are for marketing activities like Seminars, Conferences, MeetUps, and even Projects. The list is connected to MS Outlook.

How can they send Emails to a smaller selection? with Info like: “Welcome to…”
the Marketing employees have full control in the contact list, but no Offce365 admins and/or Exchange admins access

My “No-Code” sollution is to use Categories in Outlook, combined with nice views in Outlook Client and SP list versioning. 
-> Pls forgive my totally blurish and low res pics, the combination of Screen Resolution and SnipEditor did the hickup. Just click the pics for full and understandable view.

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Mark your selection, click E-mail – voila’ Smilefjes

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Note in the picture that I have a grouped view for Company and Projects. For Company I group by the standard column “Company”, but for Projects I use “Country/Region”, more on that later.

Here is the step by step guide to set this up:

1: Configure same view in Office365 Contact list for Company and Project, –same columns and ordering as intended to use in Outlook.
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2: Enable Version History
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Project participation history is now available. All the “non informational” versions are Categories, so they are reflected to O365, but sadly we cannot use them in Views and filters in O365. And also if a contact is participating in more than one project at a time consider either to just use categories (no versioning there) or use another column available.
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This Contact participated in 3 projects

3. Connect to Outlook
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Optional: In MS Outlook, enable the synced list for e-mail address book (pls forgive my Norwegian Oulook pics –but you get the picture, right Smilefjes )

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3: Create similar grouped views in Outlook
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Same columns in all three views, grouped different
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Here Seminars with Categories
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No problem quick editing in Outlook – and imediate synced back to O365.
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You can also Quick edit in SP’s all elements (not grouped)

Happy Emailing! Smilefjes med åpen munn

by Thorbjørn Værp on Nov 12, 2015 at 12:58 PM

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