If you’ve always thought of Outlook as a tool for business, the new Microsoft Outlook.com makes email more personal than ever before. Free Outlook.com provides a new user experience featuring a clean look and integrates with social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to create a more dynamic experience.
Fresh clean inbox
If the user interface of your inbox, along with the horrendous number of unread messages, stresses you out, you’ll love clean look of Outlook.com One of the most noticeable differences of Outlook.com compared to other email tools is the stripped down look of the inbox and its more intuitive design. Designed to mirror the clean lines and user experience on other Microsoft products such as Windows Phone, Windows 8, and even Xbox, Outlook.com features a refreshing lack of clutter and white space that helps your inbox feel more zen than chaotic. To create a new experience, developers stripped out everything and only put the most essential items back in. Buttons for options come up as needed, ads appear in a single strip along the right side, and clicking on an email brings up a thread of correspondence that is easy to read.
Rid your inbox of graymail
Graymail. The newsletters, daily deals, social updates, shopping offers, and other things we sign up for that just become an annoyance after awhile because they come way too often. Fortunately Outlook.com features tools to get rid of graymail easily. Select messages and use the Sweep feature to send them from your inbox to an archive, folder of your choice, or directly to trash. Love your deals from Groupon, Zulily, and other daily deal sites but can’t always keep up with them? You can use the Scheduled Cleanup feature for customized time-based actions that move out old emails and keep the most recent.
Connect your email to your social networks
Along with a clean interface, Outlook.com integrates connections with friends and family members through social networking services you’re already using. Users have the option of connecting services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Gmail to their Outlook.com accounts so when you open an email, the responder’s most recent Tweet, Facebook status update, etc. comes up along with their avatar. While users have full control over the level of connectivity, this level of integration leverages intelligent relationships on platforms everyone is already using to increase efficiency. Through Outlook.com, users can click Like on Facebook, write on someone’s all, and respond to comments, or even Retweet or reply back via Twitter to friends.
If you’re thinking that this sounds great from an efficiency standpoint but are wondering about the security of your personal information through interconnected accounts, I asked. The last thing I’d want to compromise is personal information shared through social networking tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. I like to think my accounts are pretty locked down with security settings ensuring that only information I want shared is out there but there’s always the risk of hackers. Outlook.com looks at the relationships and information you have through social networking tools and brings that information in to your user experience.
Free Office Web Apps and SkyDrive
Outlook.com also includes Office Web Apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote to view and edit attachments right from your inbox so you don’t need the software on your PC. Since 7 GB of cloud storage on SkyDrive is also included with Outlook.com, there’s no worry about the size of emails or attachments. Upload photos and documents to a SkyDrive account and Outlook.com will send a HTML based email, which is much smaller in size than a traditional email, loaded with attachments.
Outlook.com is a preview of modern email from Microsoft. It has a fresh and intuitive design, connects your email to useful information from Facebook and Twitter, and gives you a smarter inbox with the power of Office and SkyDrive. Visit Outlookpreview.com to learn more and connect with us at @Outlook on Twitter.
This post was written as part of a sponsored campaign with Outlook.com and Technorati. Images courtesy of Microsoft.
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