Outlook 2013 uses newly-added support for the rich Exchange Active Sync (EAS) protocol that has become the gold standard used by smartphones and other mobile devices. EAS will sync mail, calendar, contacts and tasks from your Outlook.com account! We've heard many requests from users who want to sync their tasks from an Outlook.com account, and now you can.

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Are you working in a team that has information interspersed amongst SharePoint document libraries, emails, and message attachments?  If so then you can relate to the problems around keeping your team’s knowledge organized in a centralized location, and trying to comply with your company’s information retention policies. This is a common situation for many teams in organizations large and small. 

With Site Mailboxes for Office 2013, teams can now bring together Exchange emails and SharePoint documents into one single place.  Team members will be able to access all of the content from the team’s SharePoint site as well as Outlook, where the Site Mailbox shows up with all their other folders.

 

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One of the new features in Outlook 2013 that I've heard a lot of positive feedback about is Quick Response, which lets you write replies or forwards without leaving your inbox. This feature came about when we observed that people using Outlook often have a number of reply windows open, taking up screen space and complicating their experience of using Outlook. To simplify the experience of responding to email, Outlook 2013 now lets you reply directly from your inbox, without the hassle of opening a new window.

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IMAP is an important protocol for many of Outlook’s customers, and we’ve heard from many of you that Outlook’s IMAP support is not at the level of quality that you expect from a product like Outlook.  We heard your feedback, and this release we made a significant investment in IMAP. Read on to see what improvements we've made in Outlook 2013.

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Have you tried out the Calendar in the Outlook Customer Preview yet?

We know many of you use the calendar to schedule meetings and appointments with each other. We also know another common usage is to help track small reminders. Let's take a look at what's available to help you with those small reminders.

 

 

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Outlook add-ins provide lots of interesting features that customize Outlook for a particular scenario. Even if you don't purchase third-party add-ins, you might already be using the add-ins that are installed with Outlook such as the Outlook Social Connector 2013. While we make every attempt to ensure that add-ins integrate seamlessly with Outlook, some add-ins behave in a way that detracts from your Outlook experience. We've listened to customer suggestions and added a new feature in Outlook 2013 to help you manage add-ins that cause performance or crashing problems.

 

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Ever wonder what's going on with the person you haven't spoken to in a while?  Want to find out what's new with someone before sending them an email or giving them a call? If you do, Office 2013 is the product for you.

Office 2013 brings all the people you care about in one place. You can view contacts from multiple email accounts, and updates from social networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Office 2013 makes it easy for you to get things done with people.

If you are like most people, you have contact information spread across multiple different sources. For example, Wendy is a Facebook friend, a LinkedIn connection, and I have her personal mobile number saved in Outlook. In Office, I can see all of Wendy's data from these various sources in one place:

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I mentioned in our previous post that while designing the new message list, we focused on the way most people read their email. Reading is only half the story – acting on messages you receive is equally important. We analyzed data to learn as much as we could about what people do after reading emails in their message list.

Delete is far and away the most common action people take on their mail. In fact, it’s so common it accounts for around three quarters of all actions! The most common way to delete has been with a keyboard, but mouse users head straight for the ribbon. In the new Outlook, we’ve put a delete button right on your message list. As you hover over each message, a single click is all it takes to delete, and you don’t even need to select the message first.

 

 

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You’ve probably realized that the person at the desk next to you uses Outlook differently than you. Some folks view Outlook as a task system, others use it to collaborate on documents with public folders, and still others use it to manage other peoples’ calendars. But almost every Outlook user reads their email in Outlook. And to do it, they use the message list.

Sure, we aren’t getting any points for creativity on that name, but the message list, put simply, is the list of emails you read in Outlook. Like other parts of Outlook, it’s highly customizable, and yours might look different than your manager’s. In Outlook 2013, we overhauled the message list, focusing on the way most people use it.

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Here on the Outlook team we’re always listening for feedback from users like you. We know that some customers on Office365 have had difficulty getting their mail when their passwords expire, and we wanted to help you avoid that problem. We have released an update for Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007 that allows you to see a notification when your password will expire soon . More importantly, this notification will link directly to the Office365 page where you can change your password . If your...