Linked Email, Calendar, and Notes to Projects/Tasks in a Shared Environment
This may be a pipe dream but I’d love to link my emails, calendars, and notes to my projects or tasks in a way that can be shared with others. I work in a team of 5 and it’s a nightmare to get on the same page for each task. When I joined the team we would all reply all in every conversation which is fine if you want to be in the loop but a total waste of time and attention when you’re only relevant 20% of the time. I got the team to use a centralized project management platform, which has made things better… but I’d love to treat the project as a hub and everything else as supporting that project. So I could quickly filter emails, meetings, and notes when catching up. I can link things through built in Mac tools but my team uses windows. Is there anything in the Microsoft world or any cross functional tool that can link those things?
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Upbase is the closest i can think of based on what you've described. I can't recall how email integration works though. But everything else should work as you expect i think. You can create a Project/List that then is entirely separate from any other project. Within each Project you then have their tasks, calendar, files, chat, etc. That should at least help with getting the everything in a single hub. There's also both the Schedule and "My tasks" page to help focus individual planning as well. They do have mobile apps, but no real desktop apps from what i remember although they did work just perfectly as web apps.
I though they were closing down?
I hadn't heard anything about that at all, but i did unsubscribe from their newsletter around January/February time. Last i heard they were doing a lifetime subscription deal so this would definitely be surprising to me. Are you thinking of something else, perhaps?
The closest thing to "project as hub" in Microsoft land is Teams, just used properly. Most teams never touch the parts that would solve your exact problem. One channel per project. Every channel has its own email address (three dots on the channel, "Get email address"). Instead of reply-all, people forward the relevant mail into the channel. On a team I was on, that single habit killed the CC-everyone culture within a month. The thread lives with the project, and the people who aren't involved never see it. Schedule project meetings from inside the channel and the invite, recording and notes all attach to it as well. Add a OneNote tab and a Planner tab and you've got notes and tasks in the same place, per project. Microsoft would tell you the modern answer is Loop. Maybe. It syncs components across Outlook, Teams and Planner, but how well it works seems to depend a lot on your tenant, so I'd only look at it if channels feel too heavy for a 5 person team. ClickUp or Asana also work if you'd rather have an actual PM tool as the hub. Each project gets an email-in address, both have Outlook add-ins, and both are cross platform, so you on a Mac stops being a problem. The tool is the smaller half of it though. The habit that matters is that relevant mail gets forwarded into the project hub instead of reply-all'd to humans. Took us a few weeks of reminding each other before it stuck.
What you did in a couple of paragraphs I have been deep in Microsoft-land trying to understand for days. They really need to do a better job of showing how transient a channel can become. My definition may be one level down from yours because I think this approach works for my “epics” like open enrollment but I think are too cumbersome for the next level down. How do you manage keeping a searchable archive for people that weren’t part of a project but need access for context purposes?
I'm not entirely sure if I understand you correctly in what you want to accomplish. Do you want a mix of a collaboration platform and a project management app? If so, check out ClickUp for example. Alternatively, you could use something like Slack as your hub and connect projects to that. Also check out Google Workspace.
You might want to take a look at ClickUp. From what you described, it seems to be one of the closest matches to what you're looking for. It treats projects as the central hub and lets you connect tasks, docs, calendars, emails, meetings, comments, and files in one place. It's not perfect, but I haven't found many tools that integrate all of those pieces as well as ClickUp does. If your team is using Outlook and Microsoft 365, it's worth checking out to see if it fits your workflow.
I don't think currently there is an app where you can pull your emails as well. But the rest I think you can do with notion. We use notion for project management and documentation purposes
i'd avoid trying to make email, calendar, notes, and tasks all become equal sources of truth. that usually turns into another place to maintain. what tends to work better is making the project/task the hub, then linking only the artifacts that explain a decision: the meeting where it changed, the email with approval, the note with requirements. if your team can agree on that rule first, the tool choice gets a lot easier because you only need reliable deep links and a shared naming convention, not a magical all-in-one database.
email client like software has best chance with this, getting access to email is highest level of trust. Only few old vendors can do it!
Maybe a synthesis of all of them and it's a note attached or some other styling?
https://getcoherence.io is exactly this. A Gmail-like email client with full bi-directional sync for Google and Microsoft email, Calendar with same bi-directional sync, Collab Docs (i.e. notes), slack-like team chat, projects, and tasks, among a bunch of other features. Since it's web based, with mobile coming soon for iOS and Android. All of your team could work together.