Microsoft Lists have finally started arriving in sunny South Africa.

They default to your My Site like OneDrive does, (SharePoint 2010 days for the industry veterans).

It’s also interesting that soon as you’re in a list’s settings – you’re back in SharePoint land, it doesn’t say Microsoft Lists anymore. They are essentially souped up Custom Lists that can now be used in various apps.

You can choose the site collection to save it to on list creation.

Once you save it to a site collection, what you do to one list, you do to both. So regardless of whether you’re editing in SharePoint Lists, or the site collection it’s embedded into, both change.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to move it to a new site collection once created, you can only change the name, colour and icon. Maybe this will change in future. This means you need to plan properly or end up rebuilding the list and putting it in the right place.

You can only share them from your My Site – it’s a bit like OneDrive vs SharePoint. This is going to be interesting to manage over the long-term.

The Microsoft Lists screen gives a lot more space to see content, which I like.

The functionality in Microsoft Lists has been pulled through into standard Custom Lists in SharePoint, so you could create and manage them from either place – the difference being that the ones created in SharePoint won’t pull through into the Lists App like these do. And it’s a seamless tab in Teams. But there is yet another app you’d need to download to view all the lists on your phone.

We don’t see all the functionality yet, guess it’s still coming.

South African version :

USA version :

Lots of things you can do with them – but as always, keep the governance in mind. This allows anyone to create lists which will result in duplicate information being captured in different places. Communicate well to people on what is already available and put strategic information lists in place first and get people to start using them before everyone does their own thing anyway.

There is a handy Lists Lookbook and Resource Centre available to learn more.

Microsoft’s strategy is to empower the individual – this is sometimes at the expense of the company. Just remember that it MUST be about the company first – you need to make sure the company is being more efficiently organised with everything that gets done, or you will just end up with millions of silos of disparate information. Strategy and governance is key to successful company management.