Written by Mary Jo Foley,
Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft has begun rolling out the new Outlook for Windows client to testers in the Office Insiders Beta Channel. On May 17, Microsoft announced the availability of the new Outlook for those with Microsoft 365 / Office 365 business and training accounts – a week after the new “One Outlook” / Project Monarch client leaked.
Company officials said that only testers who are paid customers have their commercial or educational mailbox as their default sender account in Classic Outlook for Windows and are in the Beta Channel, will see the “Try the New Outlook” switch in the upper right corner of Outlook. to the Windows app.
The new client, as expected, looks and feels very much like the current Outlook for Web / Outlook.com clients. It also has new features like message reminders; a calendar board; a single view for email, calendar, and to-do items; and supporting a trial version of Loop components. The new Outlook client also allows users to quickly attach files and documents stored in the cloud to their emails using the “@thenameofthefile” convention to view options.
Loop components are the renamed and updated Fluid Framework components – tables, notes, tasks or even a Dynamics 365 customer sales record – that can be integrated into chats, emails, meetings, documents or pages. The calendar board is the development of the technology formerly known as “Outlook Spaces” and codenamed Project Moca.
Many of the expected new Outlook features are still missing in this preview build; multi-account and offline support are “under development.” Support for Outlook.com, Gmail, iCloud, and other iMAP accounts are all listed as “evolving” along with existing Outlook features such as quick steps and search folders. POP support is listed as a feature under investigation, while US Government Cloud, Outlook data files (.pst), and folder redirection are listed as scheduled.
The new Outlook, which during development has been known as “Project Monarch” and “One Outlook”, is intended to unify the Windows, Web and Mac code bases for Outlook. This new version of Outlook has been in testing internally at Microsoft for several months.
Earlier this year, my contacts said that Microsoft would announce the new Outlook for the spring and would send a trial version of it to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels in late March or early April 2022.
Microsoft made the new Outlook for Mac preview available to testers late last year.