INTHEBLACK December 2021 - Magazine - Page 71
Above: Drag can turn Gmail into
a task management app for teams.
Above: With Microsoft Power Automate,
you can automatically turn a flagged email
into a task in Planner.
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Above: With Wrike, you can turn an Outlook email into a task that
you can manage via a mobile app.
If much of your work involves working
with clients, Outlook’s basic Contacts tool is
probably not enough. Plenty of customer
relationship management apps, like Nimble and
Insightly, offer add-ins that allow you to keep
track of contacts easily from within Outlook.
MICROSOFT INTEGRATIONS
Microsoft has released several helpful Office
365 apps, including Microsoft Planner for
managing team tasks, Lists for larger projects
and To-do for personal tasks.
To-do automatically pulls in Outlook tasks,
but the other apps’ integrations with Outlook
are oddly inconsistent. Thankfully, Office 365
includes Power Automate, which can integrate
and automate processes between these and
many other apps, including Outlook.
For example, if you like to work in Excel,
Power Automate can automatically pull in data
from emails into a spreadsheet. Another option,
depending on your version of Office, is to use
Above: Flow-e turns your Outlook inbox into
a Kanban-style task management app.
Power Query to connect a worksheet to your
email. This way you can easily view data from
emails using various criteria – such as all emails
in a certain folder.
GMAIL ADD-INS
If you use Google’s Workspace or Gmail, you
have some useful tools by default.
You can “snooze” an email for later, create a
task or launch a video chat from the inbox.
In addition, the likes of SaneBox, Asana,
Trello, Wrike, Nimble, Insightly, Zoom and more
also offer add-ins for Workspace or Gmail.
For a more dramatic overhaul, Drag turns
Gmail into a Kanban-style team management
app. It is designed to be used as a shared inbox
for sales, helpdesk and other teams, but you
could also use it for personal task management.
ALTERNATIVE EMAIL APPS
Alternative email apps such as Spike take the
novel approach of integrating chat into email
– what it calls “conversational email”. You can
start a real-time chat from any email using text,
audio or video.
It also offers a calendar, tasks, notes, video
meetings and groups. The latter are designed
for team chats, like Slack, and you can invite
anyone with an email address to participate in
the group.
The benefit of this integrated approach is
that you and your team are more likely to use
the right tool for a particular purpose – such as
a quick chat in real-time to resolve an issue,
rather than a back and forth exchange on email.
Spike also allows you to unify your inboxes
and calendars, integrating with other email
platforms, such as Office 365, Gmail and
iCloud.
Another tool, Hive, takes a different
approach. It is a project management app
that pulls emails in from Office 365 or Gmail,
allowing you to assign them as tasks for
yourself or a colleague.
intheblack.com December 2021 71