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Microsoft Lists Apps Coming Soon to Microsoft 365 Subscribers
Microsoft announced last week that its Lists applications are starting to arrive as early as this month for "Microsoft 365 business customers worldwide."
Lists is a new application, introduced at the Microsoft Build developer event in May, that lets people track information. The capabilities of Lists apps can be extended, as well, using various Microsoft Power Platform solutions. Lists are being added across various Microsoft 365 applications, including "Excel, SharePoint, Power Apps (custom forms), Power Automate (customer flows) and Power BI," per the announcement.
The Lists apps will first arrive at Microsoft 365 tenancies that opted to get so-called "Targeted Releases," which is a software release stage before a production environment-ready release. Here are the months when the new Lists apps are expected to arrive:
- A new "Lists home page" is expected to appear at the end of this month for "enterprise, education, and government plans."
- A new "Lists app in Microsoft Teams" is expected to arrive by the end of August.
- A worldwide production-level release of Lists apps is expected by the end of October.
Microsoft 365 and Office 365 tenancies with subscription plans that include SharePoint will be the ones to get the Lists apps, the announcement explained.
Microsoft has described Lists as an "evolution" of the current SharePoint Lists capability. Members of Microsoft's Lists design team explained in a Microsoft Intrazone podcast talk that the new Lists features a more consumer-friendly type of interface. Users get eight templates out of the box that were tested and winnowed down based on the sort of Lists tasks that people want to get done. The files created when Lists get saved are stored in SharePoint. However, there's also an option to save to a "My Lists" space on OneDrive storage, which is a new capability, the design team explained.
Microsoft previously explained that Lists will be accessible from the Microsoft Launcher, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online. There also will be mobile applications, expected to arrive by year's end, on the iOS and Android platforms. Microsoft also previously indicated back in May that it "has no plans to deprecate classic lists" in SharePoint, but instead SharePoint Online users will get the benefits of using the newly designed Lists apps.
Microsoft is planning to talk more about its new Lists apps in a coming Web presentation, "Working with Microsoft Lists," scheduled for Aug. 5, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The event can be added to a person's calendar using this link, or there's a live join link.
Immediately after the Web presentation, Microsoft plans to answer questions from the public in an "Ask Microsoft Anything" messaging session, which is planned for Aug. 5, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.