14 DAY TRIAL // Next year, Microsoft plans to deploy Office for Mac 2016 along with a new version of Outlook, the Redmond giant’s email and calendar software for hard-working types. A set of screenshots has been made available courtesy of a source in the Far East.
Wielding a preview of Outlook 16 for Mac, cnbeta.com leaked more than a dozen images depicting all the changes in the updated productivity software. These changes are said to include a more unified interface, though we can’t see any of the elements that even remotely resemble the Windows version.
A better Outlook, but not exactly a looker
What it does have is embedded OS X features, a poor attempt to mimic the look and feel of OS X Yosemite, support for push notifications, a new Ribbon interface that makes the app feel heavy and cluttered, e-mail conversations, a bunch of new OWA (Outlook web app) and Office 2013 features, including online archiving, a fast switching task bar, and more.
The client is also reportedly more closely integrated with the cloud and seems to be offering more collaboration features. The screenshots indicate that Outlook will fully support Retina resolutions, making it one of the first productivity apps to take advantage of the all-new 27-inch iMac with 5K display.
According to a rough translation, Microsoft Outlook for Mac will further improve on aspects like “the efficiency of the user schedule management and team communication aspects, increasing the online archive Online Archive support, support for push mail and notification alerts, schedule management, increased Propose new time (recommendations of the meeting time), calendar weather,” and more.
Part of Office 2016
We have every reason to believe that Microsoft will release both the Windows and the Mac versions of Office 2016 simultaneously this time around. Leaks like these usually come right before a big announcement, not in the early beta testing phases.
In usual manner, Microsoft will most likely offer Home and Business packages priced accordingly.
About Outlook
For Mac users who’ve never bothered to try Outlook, despite its seemingly counter-intuitive interface the application really holds a lot of value and can help one get a lot of things done from a single window.
Despite being used mainly for email, Outlook includes a calendar, task manager, contact manager, note taking, journal tools, and even a web browser. It can be used as a standalone program, and it can work with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server for multiple users in a given group or organization.
