Hi there, Calendar Community!
It is with great excitement that we are announcing that we have graduated the shared calendar improvements in Outlook for Windows out of preview! This new shared calendar experience dramatically improves the reliability and sync latency for shared calendars & delegated calendars in all Outlook clients. The improvements have been released in Outlook on the web, the new Outlook for Mac, and mobile for a while now, and we’re excited that Outlook for Windows is now enabled as well.
Right now, about 10% of Outlook for Windows users in Current Channel with version 2103 have been enabled for those improvements, and we’ll keep expanding gradually throughout the spring and summer.
What exactly is changing?
In July 2019, we announced the preview in Outlook for Windows which has remained opt-in until now, as we turn this on in production. Eventually, it will be just “on”, but this is a journey and arguably the biggest change to Outlook for Windows since its initial release in 1997, so we want our every step to be cautious. With Version 2103 (March 2021 update), the new experience reached feature parity with the classic experience, so we have removed the preview label that was previously shown next to shared calendars that were enabled for the new experience. Since summer 2019, we polished the experience and fixed bugs, thanks to many customer reports. With tens of thousands of daily users on the preview, we feel confident now that the experience is going to delight calendar delegates.
What will your delegates notice?
Despite all the exciting statements above, our hope is that they don’t even notice anything changed. Why would we say that? This is one of those improvements that should be invisible because it eliminates issues but doesn’t change the core product functionality. Calendars will sync faster, and we have eliminated any reliability issues when managing a calendar. Delegates might only notice that things are smoother but no specific, obvious changes.
Please let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback on these improvements by emailing us at olk-calendar-preview[AT]microsoft.com! We cannot guarantee a response to every email, but we promise to read them all and do our very best to respond.
For more details, here are a few more articles for reference:
Outlook Calendaring Team
