#45: Copilot updates flying in

Posted on September 20, 2024 (Updated September 19, 2024) by ewand

Microsoft unveiled “Wave 2” of Copilot for Microsoft 365 earlier this week; if you haven’t seen the video, you can catch it here, or check out Teams guru and MVP Tom Arburthnot’s tl;dr summary of the key announcements and the demos.

BTW, if you are a Microsoft partner, you might have heard during MCAPS Start in July, that (woo-hoo!) Microsoft was going to give you some free Copilot licenses as part of the benefit of being in the partner program.

The latest Benefits Guide shows that Copilot goodness is indeed coming in January 2025, but it might be a bit less generous than expected… Basically, don’t bank on getting more than a handful of seats as part of the package, and if you don’t think Copilot gives you enough benefit to bother paying for it, then, well…

Talking of “what’s new” with Copilot, Microsoft veteran Malcolm Bullock has a thought-provoking explanation of what he means by “Nothing has changed but everything is new”.

Some of the stuff that was announced in the Wave 2 jamboree will be coming later this year, such as Copilot automatically prioritizing your emails in Outlook. Other pieces – the Narrative Builder in PowerPoint, for example, are here already.

The PowerPoint Copilot functionality is amazing. Give it a couple of lines of content and it will generate a whole load of slides by finding out information to flesh out your idea. If you’re an expert in an area then it might seem to give a glib, high-level overview with not-quite-correct images, but all of that can be tweaked and updated later.

Here’s an example:

… and literally a few moments later, it presented…

Not bad at all. At least it has a framework which could be used to flesh out stuff in more human detail.

While Copilot might have its most immediate use in helping to create content like images or writing documents/emails for you, there are other collaborative benefits too, some of which were covered in the announcement. As Malcolm says above, maybe we will need to tweak how we collaborate (using channels instead of chat for group discussions, for example) to properly harness the capabilities to good effect.

On asking Copilot in Edge to summarize the announcement page to less than 200 words, it offered:

· Copilot Pages: Introducing a dynamic, persistent canvas for AI collaboration, allowing teams to work together in real-time with AI-generated content.

· Enhanced Microsoft 365 Apps: Significant improvements in Teams, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Word, including new features like Copilot in Excel with Python for advanced data analysis.

· Copilot Agents: New AI assistants to automate and execute business processes, with an easy-to-use agent builder for creating custom agents.

· User Feedback and Updates: Over 700 product updates and 150 new features based on feedback from nearly 1,000 customers, improving performance and user satisfaction.

So there are lots and lots of new features coming, if not here already. Yay.

Meetings, transcripts and notes

One of the nicer new widgets that Copilot has brought recently is for putting meeting notes into OneNote. Previously, to record what happened in a meeting, you’d ask either Teams Premium or Copilot to generate some kind of notes, then copy/paste the text into OneNote alongside other stuff you might have jotted down yourself during the meeting.

Now, it’s made the process a whole lot easier – first, you need to be sure the meeting has been recorded or transcribed. If you go back to the Meeting inside Teams (look in the Chat node), you might see a Recap option which will give you the summary of what happened, along with actions that were discussed:

Now, go into OneNote, navigate to your existing notes page for a meeting (or create a new one) and go to Insert Meeting details. It will offer you a pane on the right side showing a selection of meetings from your calendar.

Previously, this would have copied just the bumph from Outlook like the date/time, subject and who the attendees were – useful as that is – but now has added a bunch more…

It’s a brilliantly useful way of adding some extra content to notes you might already be taking, or just to more easily organize notes and follow up actions from within OneNote rather than grubbing about in Teams to find them.

#40: Product Roadmaps – over/under promise/deliver?

Posted on August 16, 2024 by ewand

Since the early days of personal computing, products were always defined and sold to their eager customers on the basis of what features they had, or were going to have. ACME Computers would produce a feature matrix showed its widget program was better than XYZSoft’s similar one because it could start quicker or store more pages or print nicer fonts or whatever seemed important at the time.

Talking about features – or, even better, showing them – would be enough to convince users to open their chequebooks, so before RoI, business value, personas or use cases showed up, the product feature sheet and product demo were all important.

The brilliant Bob Cringely wrote in his seminal tome Accidental Empires of many significant bits of the history of the PC, Mac et al (or Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date to give its full title). One tale was of a young Bill Gates demonstrating Word for Mac 3.0 somehow navigating a demo of a product so buggy that any number of clicks in the wrong place could have blown the whole thing up.

As well as selling what you have – or are going to have, real soon now – to prospective customers, there’s also a need to show that more stuff is coming down the line. The Product Roadmap shows long-term commitment and vision but also ties you into doing things that people bought your product for, even if they prove harder than you thought or less important because other things have changed.

Does saying you’re going to deliver this feature or that function tie one hand behind your back, but without it, customers could go elsewhere? In the old days, a roadmap or a demo of something that wasn’t really finished was as much a reason to stop people buying a competitor’s product, causing them to wait to see how yours turns out, as it was to get them to commit to buying something today – especially when the thing you’re showing isn’t yet available.

In the 1980s and perhaps later, Microsoft was a well-established peddler of “vaporware” – BillG even received a “Golden Vaporware” award for the years-late arrival of Windows 1.0, though the practice of promising much a long time before delivery had been going on for more than a century before.

When it all goes wrong

Sometimes a company will have scored such a momentous own-goal that its roadmap is more a plan for recovery and survival, than a yellow brick road to a brighter future. One such example is maker of homey WiFi HiFi gear Sonos, who rushed out a whole new software stack so they could launch some new products.

Sadly, the new app was missing a lot of features from the old one, was slow and unreliable and in forcing it out, they shot themselves in both feet and greatly annoyed many of their loyal fans.

Sonos’ CEO later had to apologize and promised to make things better over coming months, surely made harder by recently announcing a 6% staff layoff. Added to the 7% cuts made the year before, whatever the future holds for them might be that bit harder to reach.

Microsoft Roadmap update

Sometimes, a roadmap leads to a cul-de-sac – the product is killed, dies of natural causes or similar. But when it supposedly gets many users, the majority won’t really care what features and functions are being added day-to-day.

Over in Redmond, the roadmap of specific products and features might seem less important (unless they’re selling the products, or others selling products to them), yet quite some effort goes into maintaining roadmaps for the Microsoft 365 offerings. Presumably it’s to keep existing customers informed and happy enough, reminding them what they’re getting for their continued subscription. Or sometimes to provide early signal that certain things are going away, even if only so they can later point to that notice when someone moans about their favourite thing being wiped out.

The Roadmap site has been growing its coverage outside of core M365 products, and there are other sources of roadmap info – Azure, Windows (and info for Insiders), Dynamics & Power Platform and probably more.

In other parts of Microsoft, the moderately-loved Paint 3D – the supposed successor to the venerable MSPaint – has now been given it’s marching orders. Back when the future was in 3D – from the TV in your living room, to the massive goggles on your face, it’s was all about that 3^rd dimension until it wasn’t.

#34: Bringing AI to the Whiteboard

Posted on July 5, 2024 (Updated July 4, 2024) by ewand

One of the joys of in-person group meetings is when someone grabs a whiteboard marker and starts laying out their still-forming thoughts to the enthralled audience, almost as popular as the person who always asks a question 2 minutes before the meeting is due to end. Thankfully, there is a digital whiteboard for use in virtual and hybrid Teams meetings, too. And like seemingly everything else, it’s getting a sprinkle of Copilot-y Goodness.

The Whiteboard app has appeared in previous ToW’s (before the Great Reset) – here. As a quick summary: if you’re a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you’ll find the Whiteboard tucked under More apps in the grid on the top left on numerous sites…

… or available directly on https://www.microsoft365.com/apps/ or just launch it directly from https://whiteboard.office.com/. A Windows app is available in the Store, though it’s really just a wrapper for the web experience.

Whiteboard is intended as a multi-user collaboration tool, available in the browser as above, or in Teams, by using the Share button (NB: if you look under the Apps button to the left of Share, you won’t easily find this Whiteboard, but there are other “Whiteboard…” 3^rd party apps which will show up: YMMV).

One very cool new feature is the ubiquitous Copilot option; it can help get you started on a brainstorming exercise, for example. Start by giving it an idea of what you’re trying to work on

… and it will come back with headings which can be quickly added as Post-it style notes

Selecting one of them and choosing Categoris|ze …

… will arrange them into subject blocks.

And selecting any one and selecting Suggest will go a level deeper and bring up some additional points.

As a discussion starter, it’s brilliant. Give it a try and see what kind of inspiration you might find.

The main Whiteboard info page is here. There are some cool templates available for getting started with some pretty detailed layouts for workshops, Kanban boards etc; more info here.

RIght, now there’s only 5 mins to go, the meeting is starting to wrap up – for goodness’ sake, keep your hands down.

#31: Easy and Excel-lent Data sources

Posted on June 14, 2024 (Updated June 12, 2024) by ewand

Most people who have spent time using Microsoft Excel will realize that it probably has more capabilities than they’ll ever understand, much less use. There are so many functions used to collate, display and interpret data that it’s no wonder people turn to using it for all sorts of things.

There have been numerous attempts to make user-friendly data tools for Excel, from web-scraping 3^rd party sites to the short-lived Money in Excel for American users which bit the dust before it was barely out of diapers.

More recent releases of Excel include several Linked Data Types which can retrieve and manipulate data from “reputable sources of data, such as Bing”… (which, incidentally, had its 15^th birthday recently). Companies with suitable data governance can expose internal info for analysis, or regular end users can get started with share prices, currency conversions and geographical data.

In the Data tab in the current versions of Excel on multiple platforms, you’ll see 3 or 4 types of data that can quickly be inserted – they will perform a lookup on external information and return a data set in the background which can be displayed and otherwise interacted with using formulae, lookups and other standard data tools in Excel.

Getting real-time data is pretty straightforward – create a blank table with a single column in which you’ll enter your key data items that you want to expand on – for currency conversions, it would be a pair of currency symbols (USD:EUR or GBP/USD etc) that you then select and mark as Currency from the data tab. That then lets you easily add other columns for specific lookup data, and that can be referenced itself through other formulae too.

Stock lookups work similarly, by entering the ticker symbol in one column and potentially going through a matching exercise to find the right one. Handy, if you have a workbook for calculating when you can stick it to the man and retire to a patch in the Tuscany hills: you can automatically look up the stock values and convert their currencies too, if required.

There’s some location stuff as well, invoked by entering city or area names; it’s more text-based reference info which is returned, though it might be possible to feed some of the data into a Map Chart for further visualization.

#25: Where shall we meet again?

Posted on May 3, 2024 by ewand

If you are of the 400 million or so users of Microsoft 365, you probably use email as one of the key services, provided by Exchange Online. A little more than 28 years ago, Microsoft released Exchange Server, its first proper server product* and a key progenitor of Active Directory, an enabler of pervasive use of email in business and even standardising the means to deliver mail to your mobile.

Though its main usage is email and calendaring, Exchange was designed in an era when “groupware” was the next big thing; the idea was that the server would be a database of loosely structured data that end users would interact with using forms to display and edit those data. As it happens, an email message is just a bunch of data items like the recipients’ names, the subject and a whole load of hidden fields used in routing, storing and managing that message. When you open that message in Outlook, it uses a form which looks like an email to interpret the fields.

Outlook 97 and its numerous successors all feature a form editing capability – right-click on the toolbar, choose Customize then on the resulting dialog, you’ll see a hidden “Developer” tab.

Tick that box to unveil it and you’ll see a new ribbon tab with all kinds of functions, one of which is to choose a form from various libraries, or even design a new one (based on an existing form, such as an email or a contact card).

A relatively simple use of this kind of thing would be to add a custom field or two to an existing form; it might be easier to use categories but if you wanted to include some more structured information to a contact form, for example, you could put additional data fields with validation logic behind them. Essentially what you’d be doing here is adding some custom fields to the database, and you’d also be customizing the form which is used to view and edit that newly extended data structure.

For one practical application of this technique, see ToW 259, which shows you how to track who you sent and received Christmas cards to/from, by modifying your contacts form.

The downside of customizing a form is that you need to distribute the newly extended form otherwise people won’t be able to see the additional fields – that’s essentially an automatic process when using Exchange and Outlook within a single organization (the form is published on the server), but it becomes a whole lot messier when dealing with external parties. And it doesn’t work at all on web, or mobile, or the “New Outlook” (which is basically the web client wrapped up to look like an app). So, it’s super useful these days.

New Outlook, new Meetings

One of the subtle changes that New Outlook introduces to anyone who switches from Old Outlook, is a change in name to a key part of its functionality. In Outlook, you have appointments (which are things you put in your own diary) and meetings (which are appointments to which you invite other people or resources – or have been invited by the organizer – and that changes the form which is used to interact with the calendar entry).

New Outlook simply has “Events”, which essentially combines the previous two concepts in one. As well as a different UI, New Outlook adds some other functions, like the “In-person event” button, which lets you make the point that a meeting is taking place IRL rather than only virtually.

This same functionality is not available in Old Outlook or in mobile versions, only in Web App and New Outlook – but that doesn’t really matter too much, as all the “in-person” switch does is to append “[In-person]” to the end of the Title line.

Clearing the switch removes the text, though it’s just searching for that string and hacking it out (set a Subject line of I like people [In-person] [In-person] [In-person] and then toggle the switch back and forth a couple of times to observe). A more elegant way of building this would have been to make a new field on the Appointment / Meeting object called “in-person” and then had Outlook et al flip that switch, rather than just tagging a bit of text on. Oh well…

If you’d like to explore what lies beneath your favourite Outlook form, try opening the item (Contact, message, Task etc) in Old Outlook, and if you don’t see a Developer tab, repeat the exercise from earlier and right-click / customize / enable Developer. You’ll then see a “Design This Form” option, which flips your current item into developer mode, exposing hidden regions. Look in the “all fields” tab, and you’ll find every property that has been set on the item.

This trick can be useful for finding out when an appointment has really been created in someone else’s calendar (if they share their calendar) – if they are suddenly unavailable to meet, you could see if they had that blocking appointment in there already or just created it after you’d asked…

APPENDIX

Email was first invented in 1971, and by the mid 1990s it was in common use amongst people who worked on terminals or desktop computers as a large part of their job. While standards like X400 and SMTP existed for exchanging email with other entities, you weren’t going to be emailing your bank manager or booking a doctors appointment. For some reason, X400 never really took off as intended – who knows why? Most companies which used email relied on it for internal communications – IBM’s NOSS internal system (a PROFS implementation) had over 350,000 users by the end of the 1980s, with no easy way to send email to external parties.

As dial-up services like AOL and ComuServe started gaining popularity amongst home users, and those walled-garden opened up and allowed exchange of email over the internet, companies began to adopt email more widely and people would start to put their email address on their business cards (alongside their fax number).

*Exchange was arguably Microsoft’s first proper server product, apart from Windows NT Server on which it ran. There were other back-end products which pre-dated Exchange, like SMS (systems management software), SNA server (for communicating with mainframes) and the early NT variants of SQL Server which had been based on Sybase’s SQL Server. These and Exchange had been bundled together as Microsoft BackOffice for a while. Exchange was the first Microsoft server product that most end users would interact with.

#21: Dating OneNote

Posted on April 5, 2024 by ewand

It’s not hard to find websites listing “the best apps for … in 2024”, usually covering the same options that were doing the rounds in 2023 and 2022, with a few tweaks. The category of note taking, across web, desktop and mobile, is a common theme, sometimes offering head to head comparisons between leading options like Evernote vs OneNote. If you’re committee to one note-taking app, you’re not very likely to switch, but maybe there are people who scatter their stuff across multiple services and apps and are looking to centralise on just the one.

OneNote has had plenty of attention in ToW’s passim – see the archive – but even with decades of familiarity, it’s easy to miss some really useful capabilities that can improve the user experience. Let’s have a look at some, concerning the topics of date (and time, probably, since the continuum thingy means the two are inextricably linked).

Inserting dates & times

This one is easy, and its utility will depend on how you go about taking notes. If you start a new page for each conversation or topic, then you’re probably covered to a large extent. When you insert a page, OneNote will automatically tag the top of it with the current date and time…

In the days when (at least) two OneNotes (yes) were jostling for position, the new One wouldn’t let you edit the date or time of an existing page, but the old One did … and since it vanquished the upstart, still does. Just click the date (or time) and then the calendar (or clock) icon that appears next to it, and you can set the appropriate measure.

If you’re more the type who has one long page of notes (around a single topic, or a single person who you meet multiple times, for example), then inserting the present date/time is near essential when appending or updating stuff – just go to the Insert menu and choose your datum | data.

Of course, keyboard warriors will want to remember the handy shortcuts to insert the current date (ALT+SHIFT+D), time (ALT+SHIFT+T) or both (ALT+SHIFT+F). The first two also work in Word and in Old Outlook (which uses Word as its editor), but don’t work in New Outlook, which doesn’t.

Reviewing old edits

One easily-missed trick in OneNote is to see when a piece of text was last updated. It’s pretty clear if you’re sharing the workbook with someone else, as their updates are (optionally) highlighted and can also be searched for.

Look at your own notes and if you hover the mouse over any text or other content, you’ll see a small grey paragraph marker on the left; right click on the text and you’ll see, at the bottom of the context menu which appears, the author who made the last change, and when.

Search and find by Date

If you have a lot of notes, searching for a specific term might return many results, possibly spread across multiple notebooks and not necessarily presented in a useful order:

Look at the bottom of the search results dialog, however, and you’ll see an obscure feature: Pin Search Results (ALT-O), which will open the results in a side window, allowing you to filter and sort them more effectively.

This clearly makes it easier to find the most recent edits you’ve made with your search term. Add this ALT+O to your OneNote arsenal. While you’re at it, make sure you also install OneCalendar, which shows a view of your previously-edited pages on the days you edited them.

#20: Choosing Characters

Posted on March 29, 2024 by ewand

Windows still has lots of really old bits that can trace their lineage back to Windows 95 or even before. One such app is “Character Map” – used for picking a specific letter or symbol from the many fonts available, the idea being that you can then paste it into the document you’re working on.

Selecting some of the characters, you’ll see a “Keystroke” comment on the lower right; if you hold the ALT key down and type those numbers on your numeric keypad (only), it’ll insert that character in your document, email or whatever. Or just Select it, click Copy then paste as normal.

There are other ways to choose characters, of course – press WindowsKey + . (ie Win+full-stop) and you’ll get the dialog introduced to make it easy to pick emojis, but which also presents myriad symbols.

Office Apps typically have a “Symbols” item on the Insert menu, which lets you pick the more commonly used ones too. There’s a somewhat obscure Office feature, too, where if you type the corresponding hex number (like 00F1 as in the screenshot above) then press ALT+X, it will convert that code to the requisite symbol. Insert a special symbol through another means, and if you put the cursor after it and press ALT+X, it will replace the symbol to show the code you could use – press ALT+X again and it’ll be back to symbol as before. How obscure.

21^st Century Charmap

If you fancy a modern looking character chooser which also gives you lots of info about the fonts as well, check out the free 3^rd-party Character Map UWP from the Microsoft Store.

There are lots of other functions, like an easy visual comparison of different fonts – even if the default phrase has a quick brown dog and a lazy fox…

See more on its history on GitHub.

#17: Stickier than a sticky thing

Posted on March 8, 2024 (Updated March 8, 2024) by ewand

When a researcher at 3M accidentally failed to invent the kind of adhesive they were trying to, and instead produced what went onto become the iconic yellow sticky note, no-one could have imagined that more than 50 years later, there would still be a $2.5B market for them.

Even digital note-taking hasn’t quite replaced the scribbled-down utility of a little note by the side of your desk, though IT security boffins would surely wish that users would stop writing their passwords down and sticking them to the side of the screen.

Software developers have, of course, produced many apps which can be used to semi-replicate the quick note-taking capabilities of the paper version, and 3M even sued Microsoft back in 1997 for referencing a similar feature in Office 97 as “post-it”. Oops.

Fortunately, hatchets were buried and 3M even launched a Post-It® app for Teams, though that lasted less than a year and has since “gone away”.

Microsoft produced its own Sticky Notes app (also for iOS devices and Anroid phones, especially if you’re using the Microsoft Launcher) which latterly integrated with OneNote and even back to the old Outlook notes capability.

Windows users might also be excited to learn of the new Sticky experience which was announced a few weeks back – currently available in the preview version of OneNote, but soon to arrive as a fully-fledged replacement of the previous Sticky Notes app.

You may see “Sticky Notes” appear next to the Share drop-down at the top right of the OneNote window; click that to open a new window showing your current notes.

There’s an easy way to take screenshots with a single-click though it will grab the entire window so you might need to go and do some after-the-fact editing. In that vein, it appears that the notes are stored in your M365 mailbox – https://www.onenote.com/stickynotes – rather than in the “Quick Notes” section as defined in the OneNote app.

At some point, it may appear as a separate application which will retire the current UWP-based Sticky Notes 6.0 application that’s still listed in the Store. For now, you could launch the new Sticky Notes from within OneNote, then Pin to the taskbar so you can quickly jump to it in future. An alternative is to press WindowsKey+ALT+S, which will start it up.

The app can be docked to the side of the desktop so even with other apps in full-screen mode, you can reference numerous recent notes, and when you create a new note, it will add a link back to the web page or document you were viewing when the note was added.

If you like to get the latest previews of Office apps and services, sign up to Join the Microsoft 365 Insider Program and decide how often you’d like to get updates containing both features and fixes.

#16: All about dat font

Posted on March 1, 2024 (Updated February 28, 2024) by ewand

Typography and the use of lettersets and fonts was the preserve of (mostly) men working in the printing industry, until the invention of the laser printer alongside DTP and word processing software brought to the masses that ability to have 20 different fonts in all the sizes you like in a single document.

Historically, using lots of fonts, sizes and weights might have been a way of attracting attention – look at the 1843 poster which was the inspiration for John Lennon to write “Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite” as one example …

… but these days, simplicity and consistency is generally preferred.

For a fascinating diversion into modern history, check out Jock Kinnear and Margaret Calvert’s seminal work on the UK’s motorway signage. Most people wouldn’t give it a second thought, but carefully designing the font and the layout of the signs to be employed in the late 1950s was a central part of the rollout of the new motorway network.

To test how legible signs might be at speed, an assembled group of volunteers sat on a platform at RAF Benson airfield while sample signs were driven past on the roof of a car. The thinking was that if you’re travelling as fast as 60mph, you won’t have time to read the words on a sign, instead relying on their shape – so the consistency of capitalization, the tail of the g and the stem of the h in Birmingham become second nature to the driver.

For more font-related history, check out Simon Garfield’s surprisingly engaging Just My Type.

Back to the present

Typeface trends tend to be a dating mechanism; Times New Roman looks very mid-1990s, whereas cool kids would use a sans serif default like Arial. Microsoft switched to using the newly designed Calibri for Office 2007, moving from a default font whose primary purpose was to look good in print to one which was specifically designed to be readable on screen. Similarly, the Segoe font family took a leading role as the default font for Microsoft logos and in the UI of many apps.

Incidentally, if you want to try a font out to see how it looks in a large block of text, you can enter =lorem(nnn) onto a new line in Word, and it will generate nnn paragraphs of the ‘lorem ipsum’ cod Latin gobbledygook to fill your pages up. Or you could go to Copilot or ChatGPT and ask it to write a 1,000 word essay for you…

Well, Calibri’s default-ness has been under threat for a few years – Microsoft announced its intent to switch and outlined several new fonts which might be the default. Last year, it announced the decision to switch Calibri to a newly-named font called Aptos, previously known as Bierstadt.

After a period of testing for preview customers, the switch has now been flicked and M365 users will see Aptos as their default. Cue some amusing anthropomorphism of the fonts’ particular characters and histrionic headlines from the usual clickbait foundries.

#13: New Outlook gets in own way

Posted on February 9, 2024 by ewand

Many people rely on email for their work, and in some cases the inbox and calendar are the primary tools they use. Gen Z’ers might put up a struggle on entering the workforce, preferring to commune via instant messaging or Tik Tok, but for the most part we know that email isn’t going away. Unless you have an alternative product to sell, that is.

The Outlook application that comes with Microsoft 365 and Office suite has been with us since 1997, but can trace some of its roots back some years before that. Students of history may want to delve into the writings of ex-Office supremo (who went on to bring Windows 8 upon the world), Steven Sinofsky, as he revisits some of the tensions between and the decisions being made by the various development teams. There’s a good one on Outlook’s gestation, or the one where BillG gets presented with the idea for the Office Assistant: 042. Clippy, The F*cking Clown.

In a trope briefly discussed last week, we all know how Microsoft has historically loved to use the same name for wildly different things. “Outlook” is one such case – at various times, the core application which has had quite different capabilities during its growth (especially the difficult second album version, Outlook 98) and the name was associated with a whole slew of other products and/or services.

In the Windows 95 / Internet Explorer 3 days, there was a free app called “Microsoft Internet Mail and News” which combined internet email – POP3, IMAP4 – and the long-dead USENET newsgroup infrastructure based on the NNTP protocol. This was rebranded as “Outlook Express” even though it had nothing to do with the main Outlook application; the actual executable file for Outlook Express was still MSIMN.EXE for its whole life…

[Outlook Express … the solution for all your messaging needs…]

The Exchange Server that sat behind much corporate email added a web view of your mailbox back in 1996, called Exchange Web Access, later renamed Outlook Web Access and then Outlook Web App. As the functionality developed, so the old Hotmail.com service was rebranded Outlook.com, and the functionality of Outlook Web App for Exchange users and the free Outlook.com web client converged to a degree, as Outlook.com was moved to the same Exchange-based Microsoft 365 infrastructure.

Then there’s the mobile Outlook apps – Microsoft acquired email and calendaring companies Acompli and Sunrise Calendar, and folded their stuff into the highly-regarded Outlook mobile applications for iOS and Android.

Finally, when Windows 10 released, there were built-in Mail and Calendar applications; in fact, it was the same application under the hood, but it could be started with different criteria which would set how it looked. This app is still available in the Windows Store and came with OG versions of Windows 11. If you delve back to August 2018 and Tip o’ the Week 445 – Finding Modern App names, you’ll see how to find out what “modern apps” are really called within the system; as it happens, under the hood, the Mail and Calendar app was … ms-outlook.

One Outlook to rule them all

There has been a long held dream in Microsoft of having a replacement for the sometimes creaky old PC Outlook application and the Windows 10/11 Mail & Calendar app, to bring them together under a shiny new application. Sometimes known as “Project Monarch” or “One Outlook”, this new version will use web technologies to effectively be running Outlook Web App but with offline capability, on your PC or Mac.

Spot the difference? The New Outlook above has lots of mail accounts added with different inboxes etc pinned to Favourites. Here’s the same primary mailbox in Outlook Web App:

The New Outlook for Windows has been available in preview for a while, and you might be getting nagged to migrate from Windows Mail to try it out, or if your M365 administrator hasn’t switched off the prompt, you could even be getting it in full-fat Outlook.

Having been in Preview for a while, Microsoft announced in September 2023 that this new client is now generally available, and was to be pre-installed on latest versions of Windows 11. By the end of 2024, the old Mail & Calendar apps on Win10/11 will no longer be supported and won’t be available in the Store anymore. It could be a long time coming to migrate desktop Outlook users to the new-fangled version, but the signalling is saying it’s happening someday.

Check those horses

By all means, have a play with the New Outlook – it’s actually pretty good, if you don’t get 10,000 emails every day; in fact, if you have several accounts, it does a better job of keeping on top of them all than old Outlook does (though, arguably, not as well as Mobile Outlook, which lets you see a single Inbox view of all accounts). If you decide to go for it, then you’ll still have access to the Old Outlook app as well (should you need it), and if you’re moving from Windows Mail to New Outlook and don’t like it then the move back should be smooth too.

But currently, there is a gotcha. And it’s the cold hand of license enforcement mistakenly stopping play.

Users of certain M365 subscriptions – Business Basic, or Exchange Online Plan 1 as two examples, are being blocked from using the New Outlook as their license supposedly doesn’t allow it. There is a confusion having a license for a piece of software, and having the rights to use your software against a separately licensed service.

If you look at Compare All Microsoft 365 Plans, you’ll see that Business Basic include “Web and mobile apps only” for Outlook; another way of putting that is “you don’t get the Office applications on your PC or Mac” by buying that subscription. But what if you had the actual software already, through another route? If you have a M365 Family subscription, you can install the Office apps on 6 machines, and there’s nothing stopping you from connecting to a separately-paid-for M365 Business Basic mailbox from your legitimately-licensed Outlook application.

But New Outlook thinks differently. Trying to add a low-cost M365 mailbox gets you an unhelpful error:

Raise a ticket through official support and you’ll be told “you can access your mailbox by upgrading to a premium subscription”. The irony of “Add all your email accounts” is also not lost (especially since free services like Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! seemingly have no problem), but penny-pinching paid-for Microsoft 365 subscriptions do.

Looking at the Exchange Online Service Description…

The service that is being paid for should allow access from “Outlook for Windows”. Regardless of whether that means the full-fat Outlook app that you have to buy, or the freely available “New Outlook”, this document says you can access those mailboxes. But the New Outlook app is now enforcing something different.

Predictably, there are furious users on the internet. The Powers That Be have been made aware and are trying to think up an appropriate way round the issue, apparently. How about, don’t be a Doofus, Rufus? Excellent!