The purpose of this article is to clarify the changes being made to Outlook for users on Windows and what we can expect to see as these changes progress. Firstly let’s do a quick lap around the different Microsoft Mail clients on Windows. Mail & Calendar App This is the free Mail & Calendar App that ships with Windows 10 and has been shipping with Windows 11. It’s also free to download and use from the Microsoft Store. To the best of my knowledge this has never been branded as Outlook. (Classic) Outlook for Windows This is Outlook that you install on Windows and is typically used by mo ..read more

It has been an amazing and rewarding week for me as Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) and RDs (Regional Directors) travelled from all corners of the world to gather at the Microsoft Redmond Campus for an intense week of knowledge sharing, direct engagement with product teams and Microsoft leadership, providing feedback, sharing vision and discussing current and future challenges. The Microsoft campus itself had undergone an impressive modernisation since my last pre-COVID visit, some new signs for those all-important photo opportunities! Thankfully one of the quirkier sights on cam ..read more

With Microsoft 365 Copilot becoming generally available in recent months and this being the first major Microsoft conference in Australia for several years the attendance was high (I believe the last big Microsoft conference in Sydney was pre-COVID with the Ignite Tour in 2019). Rumour has it the tickets were capped at 5,000 and it was a sell-out. I can attest to waiting in a very long line for badge pickup that spanned 3 floors of the Sydney International Convention Center! Clearly there is a large appetite for people to understand the current state of AI, the opportunities, challenges, and w ..read more

Last week was quite the change as I traded sunburn in Sydney for frostbite in Amsterdam to attend ESPC 2023! I love the size of this event (at around 1500 attendees). It is large enough to attract some of the world’s best speakers and topic experts, key Microsoft leaders (such as Jeff Teper and Karuana Gatimu), and yet it is small enough to network, make genuine connections with people and have shared experiences. I spent most of the week in the expo hall talking to people on the Ideagen OnePlace Solutions booth. Thanks to everyone that came up and had a chat across the week, it was great to ..read more

What is sideloading an Outlook add-in? This is the process of installing a modern web-based add-in directly from an add-in manifest file rather than from the store (AppSource). Sideloading is a common practice for developers during the development and testing of their add-in. It can also be used for Enterprise applications which are developed in-house and therefore don’t get acquired/deployed through the store. How sideloading used to work (prior to Sep 2023) The approach to sideloading Outlook add-ins has historically been through the same UX flow as adding an add-in from the store. This invo ..read more

So nice to see this conference return to Melbourne – I have fond memories of the last time it ran back in 2018. The highlight of the event for me was the conversations and interactions that happen so naturally at in-person events. It’s refreshing to be able to network, meet new friends, catch up with old ones, and speak to experts and thought leaders. My key takeaways came from the amazingly talented Dux Raymond Sy on the topic of governance in Microsoft 365. Meet people in their onlyness (one size does not fit all) Empower people with the right tools and trust them (rather than locking thing ..read more

When making calls to get user centric data from the Microsoft Graph API the documentation tells us we can use either the users (Graph) id or the users UPN (Active Directory User Principal Name) For example, to get the details of a specific user GET /users/{id|userPrincipalName} To get mail messages for a specific user GET /users/{id|userPrincipalName}/messages The user id is the most reliable to use if you have it available. Usually, you will only have this if you have obtained it through previous calls to the Graph API. The UPN is something that you may have more readily have available, thi ..read more

I was recently interview by Microsoft’s Ayca Bas on this podcast of the Microsoft 365 Developer Podcast series where Ayca and Jeremy & Paul talk to developers who are building awesome solutions on Microsoft 365. In this episode, I had a chance to talk about how OnePlace Solutions started as a small company in Australia and grew into a global leader in email and document management solutions for SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive. I also shared some insights into how we leverage the latest technologies and tools from Microsoft to create engaging, easy to use and compliant business systems that ..read more

I joined industry experts Andrew Jolly and Max McNamara for a hybrid breakfast event in Sydney to discuss digital employee experience, employee engagement and share tips on how to improve knowledge sharing and knowledge management in Microsoft 365. We also chatted through the common trends within the industry and gave some actionable takeaways on our top things to concentrate your efforts on for maximum return. Plus I outlined how to determine your most troublesome core processes using the airport toilet satisfaction rating system Watch the recording on YouTube ..read more

In this episode of the Microsoft “Learn from the Community” series with Ayca Bas, Mathieu Rebuffet and myself discuss our career paths that led us to developing and running commercial products at scale on top of the Microsoft 365 platform and leveraging the Microsoft Azure cloud. We demonstrate some key features of the OnePlaceMail App (Outlook Add-in) and then take a peak behind the curtain to discuss the underlying design and how we use specific Azure resources to deliver the app as a Software as a Service offering. More Resources Microsoft Graph Fundamentals: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-u ..read more