Welcome Office Mechanics. Coming up on the show we'll take a look at the recently released
Outlook 2016 preview on the desktop. We'll show the new Outlook mail and calendar
apps for Windows 10 phone and tablets
and we'll round out our cross platform story by showing you Outlook for iOS and Android
Microsoft Office
Office Mechanics
So I'm joined again by Ben Walters. So Ben
what are we doing to innovate on email what's the significance behind the recent announcement
So email is still the number one way that people work today
we have hundreds of millions of users across all our platforms including Outlook
Exchange and Office 365. And what we really want to do is make sure that mail
experience is great no matter what device you're on
So we have a Windows PC here, why don't we start with Windows and say what's new for Outlook for the desktop
So Outlook 2016 we'll be the richest experience on a desktop today
You'll see improvements in our support for Cloud Files more effective search and
deeper integration with features across Office 365
So let me show you what some of these look like.
As we open up Outlook 2016 you'll notice we have this new personality theme.
Which means we have a blue bar across the top of Outlook matching the logo and the theming
we have Outlook.
We've also included a new dark theme for people on really bright monitors
that gives a little bit more contrast and just makes a bit easier on the eyes
As I move in to creating new emails, we've also made some improvements in the way you
work with attachments
So as we share attachments, historically we usually have to go and find a deep path
and browse through our PC to find that.
But now what we have is we've integrated the
most recently used items list directly into the attach dialup
So as I click on attachments you can see I get a list of all the files I've been
recently working on
You'll also notice that some of these files are located on my C Drive, so my local PC here
and the ones with the cloud icon are actually located in my OneDrive for business
and so as I click on those links you'll notice I get an attachment directly to my OneDrive
and this is actually a link through to the file
and you also notice that we've given edit rights to those people. So as I'm sharing
files for collaboration
I'm providing those permissions over to the people I'm putting in the 'To:' line
Right and looking forward can we also expect that you'll be able to share permissions
for file that's maybe stored on your C Drive, if you want to share that out centrally?
Yeah definitely. As we move forward in our tech preview and make updates we
really want to see those files in the PC get up to OneDrive for business
and stored in a central place for collaboration
Great, so what else can you show us?
So, one of the other integrations we have with Outlook 2016
is we brought Clutter from the Outlook Web App down to the rich client
And Clutter is a way for machine learning
to take the way you work with email and move that email into a
inbox or a separate folder, so you don't have to focus on it as soon as you need to
So what you'll see here is, I have a Clutter folder and I have all this
email coming through and I want to be able to teach my machine learning
what's important and what's not. So my holiday party recipe here, I'm going to right click that
and as I come down in my interface, in my right click menu, you can see I have a move to Clutter button
And what this does, is pushes that email
out to my Clutter folder and teaches the machine learning for next time to move that around
These are just a few highlights for the Outlook client right?
That's right, we also have
new support for groups coming into the rich client and we'll also have support for
OAuth as we move forward which enables these great multi-factor authentication scenarios
This is really great stuff if you've got a mouse and a keyboard but what if I'm gonna go
with Windows 10 on a phone or a tablet
what improvements are we making there?
We've been hard at work on the email
experience for phone and small tablets that are running Windows 10
the first thing you'll notice on this new version Outlook mail
for WIndows 10 is that the experience
is really different than what we had on Windows 8
and that's because we designed this from the ground up for Windows 10
you'll see as well that its really familiar to those people who worked on
Outlook before. So you'll notice we still have a folder pane on the left hand side
and our message inbox and message pane on the right as well
really easy for you to pick up and use. But the improvements go beyond just the look and feel
We've created a much richer authoring experience and we've taken advantage of
all the functionality that we have
in Word and put that into the editing experience as well
So as I create a new email here
you'll notice I have all of the format controls
insert, all those features and things that I have in Word today
in my editing experience for email
That's the authoring experience but what about
triage in your email?
Well look, when we think about touch we've got some great functionality that
comes in as part of that
and when we think about triaging and we have these new swipe gestures that we can use
within the application so that we can very quickly go through and set flags or
delete emails
we can even customize those swipes so we can move it to other folders or to archiving as
well, so really easy for me to be able to triage those messages quickly
And it's easy to get back to your calendar as well right?
That's right, so we have a calendar link right down on the bottom here which will take me straight into the
calendar view of what's going on where my schedules at
and when we look at the calendar we've got a whole bunch of new things in there as well
So you can see, I've got all my, I'm counting the US holidays and birthdays
and appointments in there
We've also got things like being able to pinch zoom into weeks
and then in two days as well. So I can really start to get a view as to what's happening
and really easily navigate through that calendar experience
So here we're corrected outlook.com but I know other services can be connected to
with this app as well right?
That's right, so we have support for
anyone running Exchange or Office 365 we also have
Exchange for IMAP and POP and other provideders as well like Yahoo and Gmail
This is great to see but what else is coming?
We have some great new features coming
as well with Cortana on Windows 10 you'll be able to instruct Cortana to
do things like send emails and schedule meetings for you on your behalf
So beyond Windows, we also launched Outlook for iOS and Android
So Ben can you give us a quick look at the new capabilities of those apps?
Sure, so earlier this year we released an Outlook app
for iOS and a preview version this app for Android
what we found was that a lot of people tend to use first party applications on
their phone which is great for triaging email but really
it keeps them waiting to get back to a PC to do
full work to really work with that inbox. So what we've done with these apps
created a way for them to manage their Inbox effectively while they're on the go
So if I open up my new Outlook for iOS app
there is a couple things you'll notice first of all. First off we have these two
tabs of email. So I have a focus tab and an other tab
and this is a way for Outlook to be able to filter my mail down to the
things that are important to me, making it really easy for me to see
what I need to respond to and things that can probably wait too later for
me to follow up on.
One of the other areas that is great with, when working with Outlook is this
idea of swipe gestures
so as I'm triaging my email it's really easy for me to swipe from the right to the left
or left to right and have these actions of ways I can work with my mail
now of course a phone and working with mail is very personal as well
So as we come over to settings we can also see that I can actually go in
customize those swipe options to suit the way I triage my email as well so it's
really easy for this to work the way I work as opposed to
the way the app thinks I should work. You'll also notice that if I do this schedule action
on my swipe we have this ability to take an email and push this out till later on
so if I decide I want to schedule this for tomorrow morning
the mail leaves my inbox but we'll actually pop into the top my inbox later on
when I need to follow that up
That's really great.
So beyond that I can also manage my calendar there right?
That's right! So we have direct calendar integration into the app
and usually calendars sit in a separate application on the device which means
when I want to start to see what my schedule looks like and where I need to be
I need to close my mail app down and bring that back up and this also creates these
amazing new experiences for me. So as I go and create a new email
if I want to schedule a meeting with someone for example, it's really easy for me
to be able to create that invite and see when I'm available and what time is free for me to do that
alternately I could also share my availability
again this is usually something we spend a lot of time switching between apps to
look at
but here it's really easy for me to set my availability come down just select the
times that I want to be able to be free
and then if I hit 'done' you'll notice we go on formatting to the email ready to share
One of the other areas that's been great within this application is centralizing all
my attachments and cloud storage
So the bottom here I have this 'files' link and this gives me a view of all the
files that are sitting in my cloud storage today
both from attachments in email and also my cloud service providers
So, OneDrive Dropbox all the main providers can be added in there so I have a central
place to do that
and if I want to share files from my OneDrive with people, I simply select those
and the app takes care of setting up those permissions for me as well
Wow, so this is excellent so this is very integrated with
all the cloud services and really what you see here with the phone, we're able to do
things that we traditionally had to use the desktop to do in terms of triaging mail
sending calendars, setting up meetings, all those types of things
That's right and what I've shown you is just the first step we're continuing to iderate
quickly to bring new features to Outlook
and the coming months we'll deliver more integration with Office 365
and improvement in security management and compliance controls
Excellent. So how do I get access to all these applications?
Outlook for iOS and Android are available on the App Store and Google Play today
Outlook mail for Windows 10 will be built into phones and tablets running Windows 10
So to get the preview, you are going to want to try that out
Outlook 2016 is part of the Office 2016 preview on Connect
These are really great updates for Outlook across devices. Of course all this news and more
can be found on the Office blog
or catch us Wednesday's or as news breaks on Office Mechanics. Thanks for watching, goodbye for now.
Office Mechanics
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