Microsoft Announces New Calendar Features for Outlook.com
- Paul Thurrott
- Jul 19, 2017
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11
Microsoft today revealed several new calendar features that are available immediately in Outlook.com.
Here’s what’s new.
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Microsoft Family calendar. Available under Other Calendars, this calendar will appear automatically if you are using Microsoft Family. It allows you to keep your family up-to-date with a single calendar that everyone in the family can access.
Improved calendar sharing. You can now share your Outlook.com calendar with anyone who has an Outlook.com or Office 365 account. (And, I believe this includes commercial accounts, but I could be wrong.) That can be in “read only” or “edit” mode, too.
Expanded support for events in your email. Like Gmail and Google Calendar, Outlook.com automatically adds some events to your calendar based on your email. Now, the list of things it can add includes dinner reservations, concerts, and other events.
More sports and teams in Interesting calendars. The Interesting calendars feature now supports more languages, teams and sports. And it’s available now in China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain or Brazil, too.
Use Cortana to schedule remote meetings. Sign up for the Calendar.help Preview and you can ask Cortana to schedule phone or conference calls for you.
That’s a pretty decent list of new features out of the blue.
Conversation 11 comments
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jbuccola
<p>Years ago, I used MS's "Family Room" feature, which set up a shared calendar and workspace.</p><p>Then they deprecated it but left it there.</p><p>Then they added "Family Calendar" in my list of calendars, alongside "Family Room."</p><p><br></p><p>Because old habits die hard (and countless recurring meetings need to be ported over), it's a confused mess. Just like the OneDrive "Family Room" folder which we were informed isn't supported but is still there as a Shared Folder.</p><p><br></p><p>Same thing with Contacts, which are munged with Skype IDs (nee "Live ID", as they are still tagged), Twitter follows and LinkedIn contacts. But those connections aren't all supported anymore in Contacts; all the old metadata is still there and many of the contacts can't even be deleted, so my Contacts — once a beautifully consolidated People Hub — is now a boneyard of broken dreams.</p><p><br></p><p>As a cloud services operator, Microsoft is abysmal at porting users to new platforms and paradigms.</p>