The New Outlook for 2024

Windows Mail is going away. Let us all say “hallelujah” and give thanks. And let us all start moving to the New Outlook, which is web-based and adds speed, more functionality and additional security features to the old Classic Outlook.

Beginning in 2024, new Windows 11 devices will be shipped with the new Outlook for Windows as the default mailbox application, free for all to use. The Mail and Calendar applications will remain available via download in the Microsoft Store through the end of 2024. Users can switch to the new Outlook for Windows from a toggle in the Mail and Calendar applications on existing devices. If you still want to use Classic Outlook, simply toggle it back. New Windows is part of Microsoft 365 and takes advantage of OneDrive and SharePoint.

While many of us are reluctant to leave our comfort zones, where the old Outlook or Outlook Email might reside, there are several reasons why you should make the switch.

The new Outlook will have a much longer shelf life than the old version. That’s because it’s part of the transition from desktop- or computer-based to web-based apps. Once you get used to it as an individual user or have your employees trained, everyone can settle into a more productive routine.

You’ll first notice how quickly it loads and updates email messages. We found it faster than the classic Outlook, and it streamlines how you can handle email messages and coordinate email and your calendar. You can pin emails to the top of your inbox so they are easy to find later, snooze emails to temporarily hide them, and then have them reappear when you’re ready to respond and get reminders to follow up on important conversations. You can time the schedule for sending emails so they are delivered at the best time for the recipient or undo a sent email within 10 seconds, and you can use the sweep function to clean up your inbox quickly by setting advanced inbox rules for incoming mail. With My Day view, you can see your upcoming calendar events and tasks anywhere in Outlook. Package delivery and upcoming travel dates are also automatically added to your calendar from your email confirmations, and you can view the weather forecast in your calendar at any time.

Aesthetically, you have hundreds of customization options and several key functional options. You can save attachments to OneDrive while in Outlook and open them without leaving Outlook to open your Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

For security, the New Outlook has beefed up its spam and malware filters, and those with a Microsoft 365 subscription can also access other security features, such as encryption.

Finally, the New Outlook has much more robust search capabilities, which we’ll explain in more detail next month.

In the meantime, we invite everyone to try the New Outlook. We believe you’ll find it a more productive tool once you learn its basics. We’re available if you have any questions about its new features. Just give us a call – 973-433-6676 – or email us if you have any questions.

The Night the ‘Office’ Went Dark

Two weeks ago, Microsoft’s Office 365/Microsoft 365 cloud-based services, which include the online Office apps, went down for as long as five hours in some parts of the United States, Western Europe and India. As of this writing last week, users were still reporting sporadic outages of some services. So far, our clients have not been affected, but It’s a fluid situation.

No matter what happened and what might happen, you can protect your data by backing up your files in more than one place. The outage hit Azure, a Microsoft platform, that we use for our backup for Microsoft 365, which was known as Office or Office 365. Microsoft 365 is built on Azure. It wasn’t the first time it was hit by an outage, and it won’t be the last. In its most recent outage, Azure and Microsoft 365 were affected by what was reported as a major Azure Active Directory authentication issue. In practical terms, users got kicked out of cloud-based applications, such as Office, Outlook, Exchange, Teams and SharePoint. It lasted from roughly 5 to 10 p.m. on Sept. 28.

Microsoft said very little but referred to an update in their network structure – and then said they rolled back the changes to an older version. It was all automated, but because of the authentication issues, some administrators couldn’t see the changes. Over the course of two weeks, problems cascaded worldwide – and randomly. Despite what Microsoft reports, we haven’t seen any satisfactory explanations of what happened and how it was fixed.

In this case, we don’t know of any data losses, but if you can’t access your files, they’re as good as lost until the service comes back. That’s where multiple backups are valuable. As a small business or home user, you may still have a computer with a version of Office installed. If you can pull a file from another storage site, such as Mozy (one of our partners) or Dropbox, or from an external hard drive, you may be able to work with your file. You also can store files on your computer’s hard drive.

One of the problems with an outage such as the one that hit Azure, you never know when it will hit. We reported on an outage two years ago, and we did have at least one client who was affected.

At the time we were affected, we were doing a setup at a client and needed to get a big file from Azure. When I logged in to get it, I got no access; I just got a message they would send a text. I had an external hard drive with an old version of the file, and that was not suitable. Transferring the file remotely from my office computer would have taken too long. We solved the immediate problem by transferring the file from my computer to my Dropbox account and then downloading it from there. We and our client were fortunate that I had the capability – files stored on a computer I could access and Dropbox – to initiate a solution.

Azure solves recovery issues for us because it works seamlessly in the background with Office 365, including Outlook and its PST files for your email. For some, backing up email may be more important than backing up files.

As an IT professional, I like Azure’s ability to generate reports – with more capabilities coming online all the time. Microsoft constantly uses customer feedback to add more power to the platform. That gives us the ability to go back into our clients’ backup records to trace incidents and to restore files after a catastrophic event. That’s critical because it can be 90 days – sometimes longer – before a hack or data loss is discovered by a client. When that happens, we can go back in time through the power of Azure to find data files that help us help you recover.

We can help you with continuity during various service outages, but it all starts with accessing your data.  Call us – 973-433-6676 – or email us to discuss your backup and file storage options. The cost of a workable redundancy system may pale in comparison to the loss you could suffer from the loss of data or the loss of access to your data.