Forum Discussion
MicrosoftUpdate on Focused Inbox rollout for Outlook 2016 for Windows users
Focused Outlook coming to an Outlook near me? It's not coming to my outlook so do I have to check in the businesses's nearby? Is this some sort of treasure hunt?
I am a partner but this brainless roll out of a "feature" is so typical and makes it hard to stay loyal(or see the worth of moving up the partner ladder). I am a very savvy problem solver and I am 2 hours deep and no closer to either turning clutter back on or getting "focused inbox" on in Outlook 2016.
Well at least they actively warned me that the change was coming....Oh wait they didn't do that at all, I have to wait for it to stop working and then stumble onto this article(which doesn't offer a working solution).
Thanks Bill! Way to leave me flat footed when my client CEO is bitching about his clutter not working. Makes me look so good talking them out of G Suite that I have to type in complex code to change basic settings. Really? Should I still be calling this clunker BPOS?
MicrosoftAs for communications, the best place to stay up to date on Focused Inbox is to read the Office 365 Message Center. We post there each time we make a change to our service you need to be aware of. For FI, we posted when we first started rolling out to Outlook on the web, and again when we rolled out to Monthly Channel (this Feb/March). We will post again here shortly, as soon as we finalize removing the modern auth requirement explained in the initial post here.
Nothing about FI has changed since March...if your customer is complaining to you, they likely in-advertently turned on Focused Inbox in the web client, not understanding their Outlook for Windows client was not yet enabled. Turning on FI turns off Clutter (since they are the same thing, implemented differently.
__Manual steps__
1. Sign in to Outlook on the web with your boss's account. Note: You need to be using the regular version of Outlook on the web, not the 'light' version. If using Light, switch to full version by navigating to Options > General > Light version and clear the Use the light version of Outlook on the web check box.
Then:
2. In the upper-left corner of the page, choose App launcher > Outlook.
3. On the navigation bar, go to Settings > Mail > Layout > Focused Inbox. Choose Don’t sort messages. Click Save.
4. Return to inbox. Refresh the browser.
5. On the navigation bar, return to settings and the Clutter options should now be available. Settings > Mail > Automatic processing > Clutter.
6. Choose Separate items identified as Clutter > Save
Sorry, but my client did not do anything to turn on FI. In fact both his clutter and my clutter stopped working at pretty much the exact same time last Thursday at 4 and we are on completely separate tenants. So, clearly it is some sort of multi-tenant update pushed out on the back end.
In any case I have turned clutter back on for both of us. I was trying to move forward with Focused inbox, but after trying every article I could find and spending a couple of hours with support last night it is just not working in Outlook 2016 on several machines.
I'm not going to apologize for being annoyed about this. When clutter was first rolled out we got e-mails explaining it. Now I guess we have to monitor a blog to find out about this stuff and even still it would not have warned me that it was going to be changed for me when it was.
- AllenFilushHey Reef - thanks for elaborating. You are correct, we had a service incident (which you can track in the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard) where some tenants saw Clutter turned off at the end of last week. That has been fixed. I apologize about the issue. You didn't get a proactive comm on this as it wasn't intentional nor expected. Going forward, the Message Center remains the best place to stay up to date on what is happening for Focused Inbox. You do not need to follow our blogs or this community forum.
As for getting Outlook 2016 working, it will work assuming you meet these requirements:
using Office 365 version of Office, on Monthly Channel, up to date, connected to an Exchange Online mailbox using Modern Authentication. That last requirement is the tricky one for most, and is being removed by the end of the year.