Microsoft's Outlook team is breaking tradition and offering a new version of Office for Mac much sooner than expected, starting with a refresh of Office for Apple machines.
Upgrades to Outlook for Mac include a new threading model that improves stability, faster launch, a modernized interface, the ability to search archives through Exchange, push support via Office 365 and a Master Category List.
The new version of Outlook for Mac requires a subscription to Office 365. The release of Microsoft's updated email client will be followed by refreshes of the rest of the Office 365 suite, updates that are said to be arriving much sooner than normal.
"Historically we have released a new version of Office for Mac approximately six to eight months after Office for Windows," states an Outlook team representative. "However, following the release of Office 365 we made the conscious decision to prioritize mobile first and cloud first scenarios for an increasing number of people who are getting things done on-the-go more frequently."
The Outlook team says it expects to release a public beta for Office for Mac at some point in the first half of 2015 and hopes to follow up the testing period with an official release during the second half of the year.
"We're confident you will like what you see in the new Outlook for Mac today, and in the Office for Mac in the coming months," states an Outlook spokesperson.
Microsoft's move to bring the Mac release more in line with the Windows approach illustrates the company's strategy to draw Apple users out of the ecosystem established by the Mac makers in Cupertino, Calif. And drawing more Apple users into its subscription services is a part of Microsoft's overall strategy, "mobile first, cloud first."
At the close of the first quarter of its 2015 fiscal year, Microsoft reported that is strategy is working and that Office 365 subscriptions had risen by 25 percent from the previous term.
Not satisfied with the success of its cloud-based Office suite, Microsoft announced that is was working on a new tool, "Sway," that would make it easier for users to slap together sleek presentations. And after Sway, Microsoft revealed that it was dissolving the storage caps and tiers that once structured its OneDrive cloud storage service.
"While unlimited storage is another important milestone for OneDrive, we believe the true value of cloud storage is only realized when it is tightly integrated with the tools people use to communicate, create, and collaborate, both personally and professionally," said Chris Jones, corporate vice president of OneDrive and SharePoint.
