Microsoft Finally Bring the Teams Approach to Outlook

The new boss is pretty much the same as the old boss, but it looks a little cleaner and breaks more often...

If you’re like me (and about half of all American workers), you may have seen this toggle pop up in your desktop Outlook app over the last few weeks:

If you’re like my wife, you’ll never click that toggle and Microsoft will need to claw the standard Outlook interface from your cold, dead hands. But if you’re like me, obviously the early adopter in the family, you’ll see a new vision for enterprise email that looks and feels an awful lot like Microsoft’s vision for enterprise collaboration in general as defined by their Teams platform.

In some ways, this is great! It’s not my preferred platform, but Teams can be a great product and the unified approach to having everything under one roof can be extremely valuable for keeping working teams on the same page. And in some more ways, it’s not so great. Everything under one roof leads to extremely uneven experiences between things, and if your workflow doesn’t fit nicely with the platform’s ideal then you’re in for a bad time.

If you’re curious about what happens when you click that toggle, I’ll dive in now. Tl;dr - if you don’t use the Office 365 suite of products exclusively, this new version isn’t for you (yet), and it may never be.

The Architecture Needs Work

First things first: New Outlook is, best I can tell, just an installed version of the Outlook web app. And that means that downloads from your email app are treated like downloads from a web browser, where they go to your downloads folder and don’t open directly. The native architecture of the Outlook app had been the only reason I ever preferred it to Gmail, primarily because I’m always dealing with attachments and opening a file natively in fewer clicks is a major time-saver for me.

This makes Office feel even more like Google Workspace, which can be nice: if all of your files are in SharePoint/OneDrive, sharing and editing is much more seamless (just like Google Drive and Gmail). But, if you use multiple enterprise productivity solutions, this is bad news. We use Dropbox, and this change has added hundreds of clicks to my week.

Right Side, Strong Side

The center of the app is the same. It’s emails. You can organize them however you want. The feel is a little different in New Outlook, but there’s nothing there worth talking about. All of the change worth discussing is on the right-most and left-most panes.

Of those, the right side is by far the winner. Instead of the customizable productivity pane you used to have, you’ll now have a single option with 2 tabs: Calendar and To Do.

Calendar is what you see above: it has all of your events listed by day, is infinitely scrollable, and also shows all of your planned tasks on their due date. I happen to use To Do for work, so this is great for me; if you use something else, there’s no other integration.

The To-Do tab just shows your full list of tasks that you can organize however you’d like. I’ve found that flagging emails and adding dates to turn them into tasks doesn’t work as well in New Outlook so far, which is annoying, but the unified view and fully-integrated to-do list management outweighs that bug right now. And you can do everything on the right pane without leaving the app.

Left Side, Dark Side

This is where the architecture decisions break down. Mail, Calendar, and Contacts (does anyone actually use Outlook Contacts? How have they not sunsetted that one?) all work natively and seem to do just fine. They’re on the left rail instead of the bottom now, but this should generally be what you expect.

But, those blue icons below them just open the web apps in your default browser. They’re just fancy links. You can also open the web apps of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint if for some reason you’d like to do that by clicking around your email clients. I can’t imagine those links are ever what people are looking for, and opening a browser from your email client is annoying at best. No one has ever asked for this.

They’re also not editable. That product between To Do and OneDrive is something called Viva Engage, which even I had never heard of before. I think it’s the next attempt at reviving Yammer. It won’t work, but I have to stare at its logo all day anyway.

Final Thoughts

I’m increasingly unsure what mixed productivity solutions will look like going forward, and that’s a bit scary. Gmail has always been the much worse platform if you don’t use Docs/Drive, and now it seems that Office is the same if you don’t use SharePoint/OneDrive. What does that mean for the Dropboxes of the world? Do they need to build enterprise email now? Or at least a plays-nice client for the big guys?

The primary feature email needs is to let folks quickly and easily send content to someone else. If email only does that for content it likes, it loses that core feature. And that feels like the world we’re entering.

Give me the ugly old Outlook that worked outside of the walled garden over this monopolistic, minimalist skin any day.