News

Microsoft Lists in Teams Now at 'General Availability' Release Status

• By Kurt Mackie
• 09/03/2020

Microsoft on Thursday announced the commercial "general availability" launch of Microsoft Lists in Microsoft Teams, which is available to both business and government subscribers.

Microsoft Lists is a new product, based on SharePoint Lists, that's coming to SharePoint Online, the Microsoft 365 Launcher application and Teams. Lists mobile applications will be available for Android and iOS devices approximately around year's end.

Lists in Teams Availability
Lists in Teams availability may depend on the sort of Microsoft 365 updates an organization elects to receive. The feature started rolling out in August to tenants getting "targeted" update releases, according to Lincoln DeMaris, a Microsoft principal program manager on the Microsoft Lists team, in an interview published by Microsoft on Monday.

The application more likely will arrive in Microsoft 365 tenancies in early September, and will get finalized in mid-October, according to Daniel Glenn, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, in an Aug. 8 "365 Message Center Show" podcast.

Lists wasn't there in Teams when I checked the Apps menu in our own company's implementation. However, when it's available, Lists will get added by default for all Teams users unless IT pros block it, according to this Microsoft document. Data used with the Lists app are stored in an organization's "SharePoint Online team site," the document explained. Permissions associated with Lists in Teams apparently get controlled via SharePoint List or Library permission controls that IT pros may set.

Lists Capabilities
Microsoft Lists is different from other Microsoft list programs in providing user-friendly templates to help create lists. Within Teams, it's possible to chat about the lists using a pane on the right side. Lists also can be created from Excel workbook files, if wanted.

Microsoft's premade Lists templates include:

• Patients
• Loans
• Incidents
• Issue Tracker
• Event Itinerary
• Business Trip Approvals
• Team Contacts
• Asset Tracker
• Project Planning
• Onboarding Checklist

The first three lists (Patients, Loans and Incidents) are described as being new "industry-specific templates." It's also possible to create new lists by scratch, or create a new list using the formatting of an existing list.

End users can change the views in how the list information gets presented. Some views, though, such as "calendar views, gallery views and rules" are yet to come, according to DeMaris. While end users typically create lists within an organization, they also can create personal lists. DeMaris suggested Microsoft was working to address possible organizational governance issues associated with this personal lists creation capability.

Lists is powered by the same technology Microsoft uses to power SharePoint Site designs, DeMaris explained. That circumstance means that some of the same sort of customization options available for SharePoint Sites may be coming to Microsoft Lists, as well, he suggested.

Organizations using Lists in SharePoint Online don't need to migrate them to SharePoint Lists because they are basically the same thing, DeMaris noted.