Do you live in Microsoft Outlook at work as much as we do?

Microsoft are excited to introduce multiple updates to Outlook for Windows. The “Coming Soon” feature offers a preview of new user experiences coming to Outlook such as a new, simplified ribbon and provides customers the opportunity to try the experience at their convenience. We’ll be rolling these changes out over the course of the next few weeks.

How does this affect me?

As these updates roll out, users will experience the following changes to Outlook for Windows:

– Coming Soon preview pane: The “Coming Soon” preview pane will enable your users to preview, read about and experience changes that are coming soon to email and calendar. Users will be able to turn on this experience with an on/off toggle which will require Outlook to restart. Users are also encouraged to provide feedback in the new Coming Soon pane.

– A simplified ribbon: Users will have the option to collapse the ribbon into a single row of most commonly used commands. The ribbon will also be customizable where users can pin and remove commands from the ribbon based on their preferences and expand the ribbon back to the multi-layered, classic ribbon at any time.

– Additional user experience updates to the folder pane, message list, message, and calendar read/compose screens. The updates include typographical, alignment and use of text color to simplify the experience, making it easier to use and more efficient for customers.

These new experiences will not affect existing functionality and will only be available to Office 365 organizations in the Monthly Channel. Organizations with Office 2016 will not receive these updates.

We’ll begin rolling this experience out to Targeted Release organizations over the next few weeks and then to Standard Release organizations in production.

After the new user experience updates described here are fully rolled out to Office 365 organizations, the “Coming Soon” button and toggle will eventually disappear from the Outlook canvas and the new user experience updates will integrate into the normal experience. The Coming Soon preview pane and toggle may re-appear when we are ready to showcase a new set of changes to preview.

NAR Design provide Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions and tailor migration, rollouts and management. Contact us for more information.