Mail & Calendar Apps Will Be Replaced with New Outlook for Windows December 2024

Teresa_Cyrus

Greetings!

Our Agency utilizes non-profit enterprise licenses with an exchange online server hosted in the cloud in a hybrid environment with on premise DCs.

A key requirement of our agencies business strategy is being able to effectively communicate with shared calendars and resource room bookings. 

As we have visitors and staff that often need to know what room their meeting is in, but don't have the luxury of pulling out a laptop or other connected device to check what room they are in.

I was able to setup a micro PC with windows 10 in Kiosk Mode to run the Windows 10 Calendar app (which you are scheduling to phase out and replace with this new outlook for windows variant) to display all the room bookings for the day on a screen at our entrance. it truly needs to do only this one thing.

I invested many hours in researching the best methods to create this "Dashboard" Kiosk display, and it functions amazingly well as is in a "set it and forget it" capacity.

The system uses a local kiosk account to run the calendar app, which is then setup to authenticate against our licensed enterprise account which is given delegate access to display all the room bookings on wall mounted display. It reboots each day to ensure the current days events are displayed correctly. it requires no intervention, and is very reliable.

The fact is, I was not able to find any other means to solve this requirement, except through use of the existing windows 10 calendar app. And I looked. Once I realized there was a native solution i could configure, the choice was obvious. Everything else failed in some capacity, was unreliable, didn't display information, or was cost prohibitive.

Unfortunately, in testing today with the new version of this app, I found that it refused to authenticate with my "work or school" account due to the license assigned. Is there some restriction in place? It was odd because I was able to authenticate once successfully in testing the new app, and then all subsequent attempts were blocked. I'm rather frustrated by there being some kind of wall, which i presume is to encourage the use of business/enterprise applications for use with enterprise licenses.

Regrettably, windows kiosk mode doesn't allow the selection of say, Outlook 2019 for desktop as an app that can be launched, and even if it did, it would give access to the entire outlook environment, when I explicitly just want the calendar function as the default. 

The take away, is that your new app under the current strategy is not going to provide a very niche function that I require which already exists inside the existing app, at least in its current state. 

To be viable, I need this app to launch in kiosk mode with a local account so it auto signs in, and not care that its connecting to an enterprise account with Office 365 E1 license assigned so that I can display a calendar with room bookings as a dashboard of events on a screen at the entrance to our main office.

I also do not want to have to jump through a ridiculous amount of hoops to make this work after you retire the existing apps. It isn't broken, and I'd appreciate not being required reinvent the wheel because your new app doesn't allow me to do the same things.

If there is a work around to this, then i have not found it, 

As such, I have switched my 2 Kiosks back to the old version, and I am not happy about the complaints I am going to get when you force the change and retire what I need and am actively using. 

Best Regards, 

Kris