Stay connected to your VIPs with Outlook mobile
Published May 13 2019 09:48 AM 65.4K Views
Microsoft

Our time, attention, and  people in our lives are precious. We need to stay connected, organized and do so in a way that keeps us focused on what matters while keeping sensitive information secure. We are pleased to announce the capability to customize your Outlook mobile email notifications from your favorite people (VIPs), enhancements to Outlook for Android Contacts, and additional use of intelligent technology from Office Lens. Outlook mobile is designed to help you focus on what matters and stay connected with your important people, so you can organize and get things done, safely. 


Favorite people and notifications

Selecting someone as a favorite person in Outlook mobile creates a special place in your sidebar to quickly access recent emails from them and makes it easier to stay connected. You can manage your favorite people, folders and Outlook groups -- just tap the pencil in the sidebar to edit your Favorites. Changes you make to your Favorites in Outlook mobile will also affect your Favorites in Outlook on the web.

 

Account sidebar favorites.png
Favorite people, folders and groups in the Outlook mobile sidebar

 

Our goal, however, is to help you stay focused on what matters at work and in your personal life. Days are often full of distractions and it’s critical not to miss emails from people that are important to you such as your boss, spouse or gym buddy. Outlook mobile can help you stay on top of things without interruption when you only receive notifications from your VIPs.  

Now, in addition to the option to receive notifications from your Focused Inbox, Focused Inbox or Other or no notifications, customers who use the Microsoft sync technology for Outlook mobile can choose to be notified only when an email from one of your favorite people is delivered to your inbox.  

 

Marking someone in your company or one of your saved Outlook contacts as a favorite is easy. You can tap on their email address or search for them in Outlook mobile to bring up their contact details. Simply touch the star in the top right corner of the contact card to add the contact automatically to your list of Favorites in your sidebar.

 

Android contact card.png

 

Also, we’re pleased to bring enhancements to the Outlook for Android contact card with additional contact details, information about where they fit into the company reporting structure and insight about who they work with (powered by the Microsoft Graph).

For more detailed information about the Microsoft sync technology, how to set-up favorite people and notifications and manage your contacts in Outlook for iOS and Android, you can look at the in-app FAQs in Help & Feedback or click here to learn more. The Microsoft sync technology is available to all Outlook.com users of Outlook mobile and is rolling out to Office 365 customers over the coming months.

 

Office Lens in Outlook

But what if your favorite person is not yet one of your Outlook contacts?  Outlook for iOS and Android has a quick and easy way to add people to your Outlook contacts, just scroll to the bottom of the contact card of someone in your company and tap Add to Contacts. If your favorite person is outside your company and you have their business card – or if you’re at a conference and you collect a number of business cards, to further help eliminate clutter, stay organized and save you time, we also recently rolled out the option to scan a business card in Outlook for Android.  This way it’s fast and easy to add a contact any time. Watch this short video about adding contacts to Outlook.

 

 

We’re really excited about this new capability because it saves you time and helps you most when you’re on the go; no typing required, just scan and save.  Outlook mobile integrated the Office Lens intelligent technology to efficiently extract text from images and automatically convert a business card into an Outlook contact – so you don’t have to.

Office Lens technology has also recently been added to Outlook for iOS.  Now you can quickly add a picture of a whiteboard or document right in your email so you can share with anyone to help you collaborate and get things done.  For example, simply take a picture of the whiteboard or back-of-the-napkin sketch for someone who could not be there in person and send – all directly from your Outlook email message! With the drawing or inking tool in Outlook for iOS, you can now comment, highlight and personalize your message so it gets the attention it deserves.  This new inking tool will be added to the  Outlook for Android document, photo and whiteboard capture experience in the coming months.

 

iOS iPhone 7 Lens in outlook_ink.gif

 


Outlook mobile is a managed app

We recognize the importance of keeping sensitive information safe and that includes when you share company information through scanning documents, picture taking or adding information to your favorite contacts.   Outlook mobile can help you stay organized and connected while keeping your company data secure.

Outlook mobile is part of the Microsoft 365 suite of managed applications with built in support for application protection policies that can be applied through mobile app management solutions such as Microsoft Intune. This way, companies can control how data moves between applications.  For example, images of whiteboards and documents taken with Outlook mobile described here have the same protection as other email messages and attachments. If taken with the device camera app and shared outside of Outlook mobile, companies would not have the same controls.

This helps prevent any potential sensitive information that may be recorded in your contact details, such as home addresses of employees, from being stored outside applications that are managed by your company.  

With Enterprise Mobility and Security which includes Intune, Conditional Access, and Azure Active Directory, Outlook mobile helps companies comply with their data security and compliance requirements. 


We are really pleased to deliver more capabilities in Outlook mobile for you to organize, connect and get things done quickly.  Simply adding Outlook contacts using intelligent technology to quickly scan business cards, sharing document and whiteboard images on the go and keeping you focused with customized notifications from only your VIPs are all capabilities designed to help you stay productive. But we’re obsessed with doing it in a way that helps keep your sensitive information safe. 

Please continue to give us feedback about Outlook mobile in-app with Help & Feedback and go here to find recent Outlook mobile videos.  You might find a tip or two you didn’t know were there! You can also join us for our webinar on June 6th where we’ll demo time saving tips in Outlook mobile including some of the capabilities announced today

 

Thanks!

10 Comments
Copper Contributor

When will the scan business card functionality work on the iphone?

Copper Contributor

When this update is out?

Brass Contributor

A few feedback items on the VIP option.
1. I have a number of executives or senior managers that I want to add to my VIP list. Adding them to favorites means I have to scroll down to check each one. I should be able to select which I want to favorite or only show that I have an unread email from a VIP. Favorites the way this is set up is a just a search filter. 

2. The alert option only give you the ability to notify on a new email OR from a VIP. The preference here would to allow for a different alert type for VIPs so I can tell I have a VIP email vs a normal one. If you wanted to get fancy here, you could even provide the option to allow a VIP to alert even when on do not disturb (like Skype/Teams does)

Copper Contributor

No matter how many different ways I have tried to add a favorite person, I cannot get the "Favorite Person" notifications to work.  Anyone else having this issue?

Iron Contributor

While I glad that there is at least some way now to be notified about the VIP emails ( e.g. my managers, etc.) , it is deeply frustrating to see how combesome and inflexible the solution is. 

 

Why just not do what iPhone Mail has been doing for years and everyone loved it : have ability to set notification for a particular folder(s). 

Or at least add VIP "search folder" that is based on list of VIP contacts. 

Or just do what Outlook client does with Search folders.

 

It is deeply frustrating to watch how MS "reinvents a wheel" for a basic functionality which exists in other apps for decades.  And users have to struggle in a mean time and in this case either contantly check email or miss important ones. 

Copper Contributor

I have to agree with @Yuri Deglin above.  This doesn't solve much for us.  It's not that we want notifications only from certain people, we want to be able to change them for certain people.  I have a large group of users that want to go back to native iOS mail instead from Outlook because of this.

Brass Contributor

I am in the same boat as @d_wand. I am curious if it's because I have rules to filter all messages to sub-folders, so that my Inbox stays clear except for meeting requests. Is this feature only looking at the Inbox? If so, that's a major oversight on Microsoft's part.

Copper Contributor

I have no idea where Microsoft's head is?? I dont need fancy lens technology, the ability for outlook to read my emails, etc. Can we just get a basic VIP system in place that allows you to organize VIP emails and customize alerts for each VIP? As another commenter stated, other apps (NINE) has been doing this for years. However, Microsoft cant seem to understand this. If my company didnt force us to use the Microsoft mobile app for email, I would have deleted it long ago. Microsoft, I know you have some incredible talent. Please take a step back and look at what your users want and focus on that. 

Copper Contributor

Same as everyone above: Is it possible to get the notifications for your VIP contacts in one place? Not a listing for each and every person?

Like in the iPhone mail app.

Copper Contributor

Good morning, I'm trying to find out IF VIP list from Outlook is possible to perform on my company iPhone, to priority one email and comes right back with especial tone into my iPhone and display in my iPhone screen when that particular person sends me the email. I have this feature active on my iPhone for the regular email and works perfect, but I do realize with outlook I can't do that, also read some community portals and it said that it was not possible, but this was back in 2019, wondering if is a possible to do it on these days please help. 

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