Microsoft new Windows Outlook email client, the so-called “One Outlook” project the company has been working on, appears to be almost ready for prime time.
Some users have been capable of downloading the new app, as first spotted by Windows Central, though it seems to only operate for work and educational accounts right now. However, those who can get in are discovering… well, it’s pretty much precisely what you’d anticipate.
We’ve long attended that the future of Microsoft’s mail clients would examine a lot like the Outlook web app, and indeed, the new app emerges to be just that.
It’s much lighter and more straightforward than previous versions of Outlook for Windows and much more robust than the built-in Mail app it is also slated to replace eventually. The app is fully hosted online, too, as Microsoft continues to move its services to the web rather than run them exclusively as native apps.
“We appreciate the excitement for our next update and will have more to share in the coming weeks,” Scott Stiles, the vice president of product management for Outlook told. “The version available for download is an early unsupported test version of Outlook for Windows and is missing some of the features and enhancements available for our beta testers. We encourage our customers to wait for the beta version to be released.”
The app was reportedly supposed to be in testing in 2021, with plans to replace the other clients this year eventually. Now, it seems likely Microsoft will officially announce the new app at its Build developer conference at the end of this month and move to replace Mail, Calendar, and eventually other versions of Outlook.
We’ll have to stay until we can get our hands on the new app to see, but it’s safe to say that desktop apps that act as shells for web apps have a bit of a spotty history. But with Microsoft’s long-standing push for Progressive Web Apps, the future is coming one way or another.
The transition won’t be easy since so many Outlook users have a long history with the way the app has worked, and an experience based on the sparser, cleaner web app will feel like a huge departure.
On the other hand, Microsoft is likely to have multiple versions of Outlook available to users, at least for a while. Its path forward is clear, though: there is only One Outlook in the future. And it starts with the web.