Microsoft Introduces New, Completely Redesigned Outlook App for Windows

For years, Microsoft has secretly planned to unify its disparate Outlook clients for the web, Windows, and macOS. Today, that goal is one step closer to completion with the introduction of a new Outlook client for Windows users that replicates the look and feel of Outlook Web Access.

The new app is available to Office Insiders in the beta channel who have a Microsoft 365 work or school account. Regular Microsoft accounts are not currently supported. This appears to be the same version of the Outlook client that went public a couple of weeks ago.

The unified Outlook client, also known as “One Outlook”or “Project Monarch”, will be a particularly welcome change for Mac users. The Mac version of Outlook has always looked different and less full-featured than the Windows client, although the current situation is much better than the bad old days of Microsoft Entourage.

It is reported that the new Outlook application will replace not only the current Outlook application, but also the built-in Mail and Calendar applications in Windows. These apps have received minor Windows 11 updates to bring them in line with the redesigned user interface, but otherwise there haven’t been many functional improvements in recent years. The new Outlook app will work on Windows 10 and 11, but we don’t know if it will replace the Mail and Calendar apps on both operating systems.

The new Outlook application is still in its early stages of development, so there is a long list of common email client features that it does not support. Work in progress and planned features that are not yet supported include support for IMAP mail accounts, @outlook.com accounts, offline use, multi-account use, and support for working with Outlook PST data files.

We can get more information about the One Outlook project at the Microsoft Build developer conference next week from May 24-26.

Image listing from Microsoft