Yes. Outlook.COM is for personal use (renamed or evolved from Hotmail.com). Outlook Web Access was the way to handle corporate mail – stored in Exchange server on the browser. Outlook Web Access is now called Outlook on the web.
I am sure there is a very logical reason for this renaming exercise. But I could not find any documentation explaining the logic. If any of you find it, please post the link here.
Anyway, in this case, the name is not very important. There are some very powerful, new features to help you manage your email. These are available for all Office 365 customers who have Exchange Online component (not Home SKUs).
Contents
Sweep unwanted mails
Remove existing mails which are irrelevant or junk and create a rule for filtering out future mails of similar kind.
Required actions easily available
No more searching in the right click menu. All commonly used actions are available in a menu at the top at all times.
Pin important stuff
If you follow my blog I have mentioned that the good old Flag feature should only be used to temporarily mark items while reading on the mobile. These indicate that when on Desktop (or a more powerful device), I need to take some immediate action about these messages.
Of course that was a work-around. Now there is a dedicated feature called Pin messages. These messages are shown at the top of inbox and highlighted in Yellow color.
Emoji
Sometimes, irrelevant things also become important in life. Emojis are popular due to WhatsApp. And now everyone wants them in their email messages. So that is also available now. Everyone knows that such icons should not be used in professional, corporate context. But still we do it and MS has to adapt to the whims of customers.
I would have thought giving emojis in PowerPoint is more important. These are available but only in B&W.
What next
I will cover these features in greater detail in the upcoming articles.
Unfortunately all these features are NOT available in full version of Outlook on desktop yet. We will always have this kind of catch-up mismatch. But still it is worth knowing about them. Use them as required based upon the context.
