What's New with Microsoft Outlook 2013

If you are enjoying the newly redesigned Windows 8, then you are going to love the new Microsoft Office 365. Scheduled for release during Q1 of 2013, your favorite Office applications have been overhauled with cloud computing services, touch screen capabilities, and much more. We will highlight a few of these new features by looking at Outlook 2013.

Social Connectors
Microsoft has designed Outlook 2013 to be your communication portal for all of your contacts. The Social Connector tool integrates the people in your contact folders to their various social media accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.; this give you the ability to check on all of their updates from within Outlook. This has the potential to be a huge time saver from having to visit each social media website and sift through ten lame posts to find one post that you might care about.

Share Your Calendar
The Share Your Calendar feature for Outlook 2013 is a pretty straightforward feature that allows you to, you guessed it; share your calendar with others. Share Your Calendar will easily keep your entire team organized by giving people with permissions the ability to check each other's schedules before making plans. You can even view different schedules side by side to check for openings.

Peeks
Microsoft has been making updates to Outlook for over fifteen years; it is safe to say they know what Outlook features users find to be most important. With the new Peeks feature, you can view at a glance your most used Outlook features like schedules, email, and contact information, all from a pop up display in the corner of the project you are working on. The advantage to Peeks is having the ability to not interrupt your workflow in order to check on a specific detail.

Weather Bar
Outlook 2013 has been designed to help you make plans by giving you quick access to all of the information relevant to planning; this includes information regarding the culprit responsible for ruining many plans, the weather. Weather Bar will give you a weather forecast on a specific day at any location, and can be placed in Outlook anywhere you might need it. This means you do not have to go to another source to check the forecast, making it quicker to make your plans. By positioning the Weather Bar next to your calendar, or the calendar of a team member from a different location, this will make a huge difference when planning an outdoor function.

Fast Filters and Context Commands
The touch-friendly overhaul of Windows 8 can be seen in Outlook 2013 with the Fast Filters and Context Commands feature. This feature allows you to customize your Outlook layout in a way that makes the most sense to you; this means you can arrange, filter, and work with all the features of Outlook 2013 in a way that is most natural to how you touch, click, and swipe your PC or device.

This is just a brief look at the new features of Outlook 2013. There are many new upgrades to all the applications of Office 365 that can improve the way you do business. If you would like to know more about Office 365, or if you have questions about anything IT related, then call Computerware at (703) 821-8200. We can not only answer your questions, but we can also install your Microsoft software and remotely manage your updates and software licenses. Computerware will always be here for you to ensure that you will have the most productive Office 365 experience possible.