Outlook

Microsoft has announced several updates coming to Outlook that are designed to make it easier to add tasks to To Do and manage your calendar.

Outlook for Windows is introducing an option to allow users to save some settings in the Microsoft 365 cloud.

This week in Teams, we've been exploring some new functionality rolling out for use with Intune, meeting limits/meeting join improvements, interoperability settings and more.

This month, the news is mostly around the Office clients and the Power Platform. I guess those teams decided to work harder than the rest or it could be that teams like the SharePoint group are busy delivering on a lot of new features they had already teased.

A bug in Outlook desktop's implementation of the MAPI over HTTP protocol allows users whose mailboxes are on hold to remove attachments from messages. The removal is not captured by the copy-on-write feature of Exchange Online Native Data Protection, which potentially compromises the ability of Data Governance managers or eDiscovery investigators to recover information needed for compliance purposes. All in all, it's a mess that Microsoft needs to clean up quickly.

Outlook users are more than aware of the problems involved in message recall, a feature that's only available in Outlook desktop and has a nasty habit of not working. The reasons why the feature fails are well known, but soon might be addressed by a new Exchange Online implementation that promises to work for all clients and across Office 365. Time will tell if careers and love can be rescued by the new message recall.

Microsoft's FindTime service helps Office 365 users find the right time to schedule a meeting with people inside and outside their tenant. It's an underappreciated gem. And the good news is that an even better service called Calendar.Help is on the way. Well, it's better if you like asking Cortana to find the right meeting dates for you rather than the more-hands on approach taken by FindTime. Whichever way you cut it, help is always appreciated when setting up meetings, so it's nice that these tools are available.

How to set up notifications in Windows 10 to maximize productivity while not missing important tasks and messages.

Microsoft has announced that Exchange Online and Outlook will soon synchronize email signatures across devices. Does this mean that the ISV market for email autosignature products is over? I don't think so because there's lots of other things to do with email signatures once device synchronization is handled.

Tony Redmond and Paul Thurrott discuss Teams momentum, Teams as the new Outlook, OneDrive, and hybrid computing at AvePoint's Shift Happens conference in Washington D.C.

Slack released some integrations for Office (365) on April 9. I took a look and discovered some interesting things about how the Outlook add-in for Slack works (and doesn't work sometimes). If you use Slack, you'll probably be interested in a tighter connection between it and Office, but if you're invested in the Office 365 ecosystem, Teams is a better choice.

Microsoft is still building out the new OWA (for Exchange Online) interface. One new feature is the ability to make categories into Outlook favorites. This seems like a small thing, but it's really quite useful if you make an effort to use categories. Some people will love it. Some will say "blah."

Microsoft has optimized the Click-to-Run version of Outlook for Office 365. There's nothing startling about that, but the Outlook team didn't communicate the change well and they weren't very kind to people who asked them to reconsider the change in UserVoice. That's not good.

After acquiring the app, Microsoft rebranded it to Outlook and the rest is history; the email app remains one of the top downloaded applications for iOS and Android. But the founder, Javier Soltero, is departing Microsoft.

You can connect LinkedIn to Office 365 so that Office 365 users are able to look up LinkedIn contacts from applications like OWA and SharePoint Online. Some privacy concerns have been expressed about the connection, but there's really nothing to worry about because users are in control of what they see and what they share with others.