Microsoft Outlook is easily among the best email clients around, especially if your office already uses Office and the Microsoft 365 suite.
But after its next-generation “One Outlook” client leaked recently, Microsoft has decided to take the wraps off the new email experience for anyone on the Office Insiders Beta Channel.
The update Outlook for Windows client is aimed at business and education customers who subscribe to Microsoft 365 or Office 365 and this preview is available only to paying members so far.
Outlook update
As ZDNet highlights, Microsoft has added a number of updates and changes, including a new look and feel, message reminders, a single view for calendar, email, and to-do items, and the ability to more easily attach cloud files.
Of course, this isn’t the final version – which is why it’s only available on the Insiders Beta Channel – and a few features are therefore missing, such as multi-account and offline support.
Based on what we’ve seen from the leak, the new Outlook has some really clean lines and a more minimal design language.
Here is how One Outlook settings, peoples, new mail and calendar page#WIndows11 #FluentDesign #OneOutlook pic.twitter.com/mCO9MModgJMay 6, 2022
One client to rule them all
The basic idea behind One Outlook is to unify all of the disparate services into one place, with the web app serving as the foundation for everything.
The client has been codenamed Monarch by Microsoft during its development and the ultimate goal is one client across all major platforms, from Windows to macOS to the web.
But people don’t seem totally sold yet.
Change, of course, is always difficult, especially for something as crucial as an email client, but the reception to the leak was mixed, to say the least.
Many on social media questioned whether a web app, which are likely to consume a lot of memory, was the best approach. As Microsoft rolls out the update more widely, we’ll get hands on to see for certain.
