Let's deep dive into Ignite 2024 announcements for Outlook
Since its launch, Copilot in Outlook has helped you manage and triage your email, providing drafting assistance, summaries, and insights to help you save time. Whether you need help drafting the appropriate email response, schedule meetings in a few clicks, find key information in an email thread, or make sure your message has the right tone and clarity, Copilot can help you achieve your goals.
During Ignite, we added to our efforts to help you manage your inbox, and showed you how you can manage your meetings easier using Copilot, and also dived into the latest updates to the new Outlook for Windows and what to expect in the coming year.
Let’s take a look at the capabilities we announced this week!
Manage meetings easier with Copilot in Outlook
We spend a lot of time in meetings during our work hours, sometimes as high as 60% of our time can be spent between meetings, emails, and chats. Even scheduling a meeting can take up to 15 mins, but Copilot can make this a little easier.
Copilot now helps you schedule 1:1s and focus time, just ask Copilot to find some time with someone in your org and it will find the optimal time. Because Copilot is grounded on your organization’s data, it knows who your close collaborators are so you can ask Copilot something like “Schedule a meeting with my manager for next week” or “Schedule a meeting with Caitlin for next week” and Copilot will know to whom you are referring. Do you need time to finish a project? No problem – Ask Copilot to find reserve focus time for next week, “Find 3 hours of focus time next week before Wednesday”, and done! Now you can focus on your project.
Schedule one-on-one meetings using Copilot in Outlook
Meetings can make it easier to make decisions, iron details, or discuss ideas but sometimes it’s hard to keep them on track and focused. Making sure your meeting has an agenda can help you stay on track and make sure you are tackling the important points – Copilot can draft an agenda for you based on your input, just open the meeting invite, select “Draft with Copilot”, and provide some input like “Review the Contoso project, introduce a new team member, and discuss sales plan”. Copilot creates an agenda which you can easily edit. Once you are ready, just remember to send the invite.
Use Copilot in Outlook to draft an agenda for your meeting
Sometimes, you need to schedule a meeting with more than one person, but have you had to schedule a meeting to bring a long email to a conclusion? Reading and summarizing long email threads is time consuming and finding time between multiple people can be challenging, unless you have Copilot. Without leaving the conversation, Copilot can help you schedule a meeting to bring that long email thread to closure – Just select the “Schedule with Copilot” button and Copilot will get you ready for that meeting, it will i) Summarize the entire thread, ii) Create an agenda, and iii) find a time that works. Quick and easy, schedule a meeting in just a few clicks.
Get help from Copilot to schedule a meeting based on an email conversation
A new way to draft emails
We all need some help sometimes writing an email, whether you are having writer’s block to start or you want to rewrite some parts of it – The new drafting with Copilot experience can help.
We’ve updated the drafting experience to make it native to the compose window in Outlook, added suggested prompts so you can kick off your draft without even typing, and allow you to rewrite parts of your message with Copilot. Is it hard to choose which draft iteration is the best one? No worries, we’ve added the ability for you to review and choose between all the suggested drafts. So, whether you need a little help to get started or a lot of help to make sure you have the best message, Copilot has you covered.
New Outlook for Windows showing the new drafting with Copilot experience
What is new and coming to the new Outlook for Windows
The new Outlook for Windows is a reimagined experience designed to be more agile and innovative. With faster feature deployment and availability, it brings the latest Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities and delivers a consistent experience across Windows.
As we continue to work on your feedback to bring you the best experience for the new Outlook for Windows, there are some updates we want to share.
Where we are
We reached General Availability for commercial customers this year and are still in opt-in phase with optional policies for organizations that want to move their users into new Outlook. To see all our adoption content please visit https://aka.ms/newOutlookAdoption and continue sending us your feedback at https://aka.ms/newOutlookFeedback to help us prioritize our work.
What to expect
Over the past few years, we have been in an opt-in phase for the new Outlook. As we plan to transition to an opt-out model, some organizations have already begun migrating on their own. We anticipate that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with Microsoft 365 for business plans will begin to be moved into this phase starting in January 2025, and with customers with Microsoft 365 for enterprises licenses following in 2026.
Importantly, there will still be an option to revert to the previous version if needed. In the coming year, we expect more organizations to expand their piloting and planning efforts for the new Outlook. During this phase, we encourage you to file DCRs and submit feedback both within the app and through your account teams.
Graph showing the current state and estimated timelines
What to do next
The new Outlook migration journey has 3 main steps. Pre-migration, migration, and post-migration.
- Pre-Migration: During pre-migration, admins and their IT teams should learn as much as they can about the migration - What the migration entails and the implications for their organization. This also involves early migration piloting.
- Migration: The migration step is when the migration is executed. Piloting continues and the migration process evolves and becomes more extensive.
- Post-Migration: Finally, in post-migration, IT is wrapping up the activities from the second step. They’re also decommissioning the previous experience and learning to improve subsequent migrations.
Graph showing the migration stages for the new Outlook for Windows
Plan your migration
Review the migration kit - https://aka.ms/newOutlookAdoption
Admin control options - https://aka.ms/newOutlookControlRelease
Learn about policy management - Policy Management - Deploy Office
Prepare to manage updates and set up early adopters on Targeted Release
Transition from COM to web add-ins - Migrate from COM to web add-ins and review a list of available web add-ins.
We hope all these updates help you be more productive, save time, and plan your migration to the next phase.
Please, keep sending us your feedback – It really helps us focus our work.
Thanks!
Microsoft
