More updates for Outlook for iOS and Android

Today’s post was written by Allen Filush, product manager on the Outlook team.

Since the launch of Outlook for iOS and Android in January, we’ve been hard at work rolling out updates every few weeks. Today, we are happy to share more details about recent improvements to our People and Calendar experiences, plus a bit more information on what’s next.

Revised People section

Outlook’s People section now is a complete address book. We’ve replaced our previous, lightweight “top contacts” view with a unified view or your contacts from all your email accounts. Selecting a contact lets you view their contact information, launch a new email, start a phone call or map your way to their location with a single click. But we didn’t stop there. Outlook also provides quick-clicks to easily find all the emails, meetings and files shared with the contact.

People is now an alphabetical contact list. Selecting a contact lets you view the contact’s information as well as recent emails, meetings and files you’ve worked on together.

The unique controls provided by Android allow us to take this a step farther. Outlook for Android pulls in the contacts stored locally on the phone to create a unified address book for all your contacts, even if they are not stored in one of your email accounts.

Contact details in Outlook for Android.

Directory search

Sometimes you need contact details for someone in your company or school who’s not saved as a contact. Outlook now integrates your full organizational directory (also known as the Global Address List or GAL) in the People section. Just type in the name of the person you’re looking for in the search bar and then select Search Directory. We’ve also integrated this same capability into the email compose experience so email within your organization is easier than ever.

Directory search is now available in the People section and in the email compose experience.

The directory search feature works for customers using commercial Office 365 or Exchange Server email. In addition to contacts, you can also search for other items in your directory, including conference rooms, distribution lists and Groups.

Three-day view in Calendar

The Calendar section now provides a Three-day view when in landscape. This complements the existing Agenda and Day views to show more of your calendar at once. This is especially useful on larger devices like the iPhone 6 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

New Three-day landscape calendar view.

We’ve also delivered other improvements in the Calendar, including support for zero-length meetings, a ‘remove from calendar’ action for cancelled meetings and an improved calendar day picker when creating and editing meetings.

Search highlighting

We’re all struggling with email overload. Inboxes of a thousand or more messages can often bury important emails we need to find quickly. To help make searching on your mobile device more effective, we now highlight your search term in the message list, creating a quick visual cue for finding that key email. We also show you the number of results so that you can decide if you need to refine your query for a more targeted search.

Search results now highlight your search term.

This feature is currently available on iOS and will be coming in an update to Outlook for Android soon.

Fit and finish

Our recent updates have also tackled several other key areas in direct response to your feedback:

• Select all—You can now “select all” to perform bulk operations on messages in a folder (available on iOS, coming soon to Android).
• Undo of bulk actions—Undo now works on bulk operations like delete and archive.
• Empty trash/deleted items folders—You can now permanently delete items from your deleted items folder.
• Localization—Improvements to localization across our 30 languages.
• Accessibility—Improvements on the message list and compose screen.

Permanently delete messages from the Trash folder.

Looking ahead

Over the coming weeks and months, we will continue to deliver user-focused features to help you get even more done on the go, as well additional security and management features that matter to IT.

On the top of our list is mobile device management support. This is a must-have capability at many businesses today and we are making quick progress on this work. We are committed to delivering support for the new built-in MDM features for Office 365 and for Microsoft Intune later this quarter.

Also high on the Outlook priority list is enabling the ability to read and reply to Information Rights Management (IRM) protected email and delivering OAuth support for Office 365 and Yahoo! accounts. Today, we already support OAuth for Outlook.com, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and Gmail.

Have a feature request? Let us know right from Outlook by navigating to Settings > Help > Contact Support. Your feedback is how we prioritize new features and updates.

Thanks for using Outlook!

—Allen Filush