how to compose an email in microsoft outlook 2015

They also appear and behave differently, because they’re threads that don’t branch off like emails do. If you think about what fails, often it’s things that are so revolutionary that you’ll never get my mom on it.”īut if it’s a message that appears within an email app, how is it not an email? Group messages are fundamentally different because they don’t get zipped around the Internet to get delivered.

“We want to start with tools that people are familiar with, because they use them every day.

“Millions of people use Outlook to manage their mail we want to meet them where they are,” says Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s general manager of Office apps and product marketing. In testing out the feature, the company found that positioning Groups just two inches south of the email inbox made people more likely to use it. In fact, integrating Groups into Outlook instead of making it a standalone app was a deliberate decision by Microsoft. Similar to how Office 2016 has subtly integrated Skype into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Groups sits just inches below your inbox in the app’s lefthand column, right below where you’d find your drafts, sent items, and junk mail. But the way Microsoft has woven Groups into Outlook, it feels like a very natural fit. That sounds like it could get unwieldy fast. While Slack is basically a chat room for your business (with private messaging functionality), Groups also lets users share common calendars, OneDrive-hosted files, and OneNote notebooks. But that’s where the comparisons between the two message services end. That’s because like Slack, Groups lets users chat instead of email, straining an immeasurable amount of digital detritus from our already overflowing inboxes. Rolling out this week as a part of the new Microsoft Office 2016, Outlook’s new Groups feature lets users create sets of people with whom they can engage in chat-like threaded conversations.Īt first glance, Outlook Groups, part of Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 subscription service, looks like a shot across the bow of Slack, the messaging startup that’s taking workplaces by storm. Outlook, everyone’s favorite/least favorite email software, has a great new feature which could dramatically reduce these micro-communiques (and longer ones, too).

How to compose an email in microsoft outlook 2015