Dedicated team inboxes
complete
Philippe Lehoux
Hi, I'm Philippe one of the founders behind Missive.
We've decided to refactor the way teams can collaborate in Missive and I would love to have your feedback.
We had many conversations with customers that made us realize the collaborative flow in Missive wasn't good enough for many simple scenarios most SMB face daily.
Here are some of the things we want to introduce and/or change:
- Each team defined in a Missive organization will gain a Team Inbox. Shared accounts and shared addresses will be linkable to a team inbox.
- Each team inbox will have a self-contained unified mailbox at top level of the sidebar, and optionally sub-mailboxes, like Assigned to others and Assigned to me:
▼ Sales inbox [1]
⎯ Assigned to me
⎯ Assigned to others
⎯ Closed
⎯ Sent
- Each team will be have a group of Active users (like it's possible now), but also a group of Observers.
Active users will receive notifications for all messages received in their team inboxes. Conversations in their team inboxes will also be listed in their unified Unassigned mailbox.
Observers will not receive notifications for messages received in the team inboxes they observe and conversations in the team inboxes they observe will not be listed in their unified Unassigned mailbox.
Both Active users and Observers will be able to open the team inbox in their sidebar.
The Observer role is designed with managers in mind, the ones who want access to all messages, who want to monitor how the work is being done by the teams, but don't want notifications or having their own Inbox/Unassigned flooded with messages.
e.g. A user can actively work on 2 team inboxes. All the messages from those two will be available in her unified Unassigned, and she can also observe another team inbox pinned to her sidebar. She keeps the benefit of the unified view for the two accounts without it being polluted by the one she is only observing.
- When assigning a conversation to a team from the assignment menu, instead of moving the conversation to every team member’s inbox, Missive will move the conversation to the team inbox. So any team member can assign themselves and take care of it; other members will no longer have the conversation in sight. The assignment menu will look something like this, where Sales and Production are two different teams on Missive:
----------------------
Assign to Sales
Assign to Production
----------------------
[ ] Assign to Phil
[ ] Assign to Bob
[ ] Assign to ...
----------------------
Mark as closed
----------------------
- Unified “Assigned to others” and “Assigned to me” mailboxes will lose the ability to have all of your accounts sub-mailboxes opened. We will advise organizations to use team inboxes if they still want the ability to segregate emails received in different accounts from the sidebar.
- A conversation can be linked to only one team at a time. A conversation can be moved from one team to another team inbox manually or via rules.
Thanks so much for your time and potential feedback! :)
Philippe Lehoux
complete
This has just been released. 😃
Read more here: https://missiveapp.com/help/assignment
Robert van Hoesel
Philippe Lehoux: Very awesome, this is going to make life so much better!
Jonathan Laukenmann
Philippe Lehoux: Great news! I can't see it yet on my iPhone, probably didn't get rolled out everywhere yet, right?
Philippe Lehoux
Jonathan Laukenmann: Yes App Store role out is not instant.
Jonathan Laukenmann
Philippe Lehoux: ok thanks, just checking. 😀 Looking forward to this. Our support workflow will be so much better!
Geoff Ball
Philippe Lehoux: If I understand correctly, Observers will not see unassigned messages. Our use case for this is two staff—one part-time—and so under the old style I was often triaging even if not handling the messages. Is there a way to see unassigned without getting all the notifications? I read through the link you posted and couldn't find an answer. Thanks!
Philippe Lehoux
Geoff Ball: Observers can open the team inbox in their sidebar to browse it.
Geoff Ball
Philippe Lehoux: Okay, I see now. I had to select the All sub-mailbox. Thanks!
Jonathan Laukenmann
Philippe Lehoux: hey, im looking for a way for our support staff to archive messages directly from the Team Inbox, but there is only „add to inbox“ and „delete“ in the bottom menubar. So when working through the mails they have to go to unassigned to archive those messages, ... that can’t be right?
Etienne Lemay
Jonathan Laukenmann: Indeed, the archive button was missing. A new update is currently pending Apple review, it should be available tomorrow at the latest or later today if we’re lucky.
For the time being, swiping to archive or marking the conversation as closed will work.
Philippe Lehoux
- Active members and observers can open team inboxes in their sidebar. Observers won't receive notifications. The "Hide unless unread" option will show the team inbox in the sidebar only when there is unread content, perfect if you only want to monitor new content.
Geoff Ball
Philippe Lehoux: Sounds great. Will there be a way to convert an email account (which receives all notifications) to a team inbox?
Philippe Lehoux
Geoff Ball: Yes, from the email account sharing settings.
Philippe Lehoux
- New rule action: Move to team inbox
Philippe Lehoux
- When a conversation is currently in a team inbox (no assigned), the conversation preview will show the team’s emoji. When browsing All or Unassigned mailboxes, you quickly know which team conversations are linked to.
Philippe Lehoux
- You can assign conversations directly to a team, from the assignment menu. Useful when you need to move a conversation from one department to another.
Philippe Lehoux
Quick preview of how this is evolving.
- Team settings tab: Teams can have a distinctive color; any conversation linked to a team will have that color in its preview. Teams can have an emoji instead of the default avatar. Team members can have one of two roles: Member or Observer.
𝕃𝕖𝕤
Nice development there Philippe, looking forward to incorporating. With that in mind - will/can there also be some sort of 'fiat before sending' step? I.e. employee replies to a client email and clicks [Send], but it won't actually get sent until his/her manager has proof-read it, maybe makes a few corrections and then clicks [Send] as well.
If this won't be part of the aforementioned structure/flow update, I can submit this into a new feature request.
Etienne Lemay
𝕃𝕖𝕤 : This won’t be part of the Team Inboxes update, but it’s been suggested before. Here’s the feature request post: https://missive.canny.io/admin/board/feature-requests/p/review-confirm-mails-before-sending
Eliz Geli
What's the ETA on this? Thanks.
Philippe Lehoux
Eliz Geli: We aim to release this in ~4 weeks.
John Werner
Philippe Lehoux: How are you guys coming along on this?
Eliz Geli
Philippe Lehoux: Can you please provide an updated ETA? Our team is anxiously awaiting this and drowning in the meantime.
Philippe Lehoux
Eliz Geli: High chance we release this next week.
Lauren L Perfors
Philippe Lehoux: Trying out Missive right now and so glad that we ran across this thread! Can't wait to see this in action.
Robert van Hoesel
Awesome and very welcome feature!
In 2., would you also add the unnassigned as an option?
▼ Sales inbox [1]
- Unnassigned
⎯ Assigned to me
⎯ Assigned to others
⎯ Closed
⎯ Sent
Rafael Masson
Robert van Hoesel: That’s a good observation as this wasn’t perfectly clear above. The idea is that the top-level “Sales inbox [1]” is what you would select to have the Unassigned view of it, because this will be the mostly used view on a daily basis. So for common use, you wouldn’t need to expand the sub-mailboxes under team inboxes. This can free up space in your left pane for labels, pins, etc.
John Bell
HI Philippe! We've talked about our situation over email, but just to mention it again here:
- On our particular teams, we all work on all conversations. Rarely do we need an email assigned to a person. So our ideal workflow involves responding to a message in Unassigned in that team, snoozing it, and having it come back up for followup also in Unassigned.
- Ideally, we wouldn't also need these emails in our own personal subfolders for that shared inbox.
Are these still part of the plan?
Rafael Masson
John Bell: Hi John. The use case you describe will still be fully supported. It will not be affected at all by the updates described here.
John Bell
Rafael Masson: I'm hoping the workflow I described will be enhanced by the changes, based on conversations I had with Philippe over email. Right now, it's a bit convoluted (having to snooze emails outside of the compose window, having replies all end up in our Inbox, not being able to send initial emails from our shared inbox, etc.)
Rafael Masson
John Bell: I see. Thanks for the details. We’ll see what we can do.
Load More
→