Are You Ready for the New Outlook?

Yaacov: Hi, welcome, everybody. Thank you, Maya, and thank you Juan for joining. So today we have a very special harmon.ie event. We are talking about the new Outlook and we will be also talking about new extensibility model of Office. And we will also talk about the new harmon.ie, which will take advantage of this new extensibility model.

So I'm Yaacov Cohen, the CEO for harmon.ie, and I'm thrilled to welcome today Juan Labra, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft. Welcome, Juan.

Juan: Hello, Yaacov. Hello, everyone. Nice to be here with you today and to share some of the things we're doing here in the Programmability Team at Microsoft.

Yaacov: Thank you. Thank you for joining. So we are going to start with questions. We have a casual interview, and we have the opportunity to have Juan with us, and you guys will be able also to submit your own questions for both topics for the new Outlook and the extensibility model and also for the new harmon.ie. So please submit your question in the chat.

Juan and I will do our best to answer all of them. And Juan, so you have been a program manager for quite some time on Microsoft. You have been leading program management for Office and for SharePoint.

Juan: Right.

Yaacov: Can you tell us a little more, and also I know you have been a speaker in a lot of the Microsoft event, TechEd Latin America and a lot of other events.

Juan: Yes.

Yaacov: So thank you again for joining. What I think would be good to start with is to tell us more about your role today at Microsoft.

Juan: Yeah, absolutely, Yaacov, thank you very much. Well, right now I am a product manager for Outlook audience. So I've been working in this project, well, as you know the Microsoft, the way that it's organized that it has each of the teams: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And then we have some teams that we call horizontal teams, which are teams that provide services to all of those applications. And my team, the office platform team, is a team that is providing the programmability capabilities for each of those applications.

And during my tenure on this team, I was one of the PMs who founded actually the new web add-ins model back in Office 2013. And I have been part of this team since then, involving a lot of different scenarios. I have been the PM for the Word API, for the Excel, PowerPoint, and now Outlook now for the last four years or so. So our team basically owns the add-in model, the programmability stuff and all the related features associated with that, how to development the tools that we have for administrators to deploy add-ins and the store and so on and so forth. So it's been a good ride so far.

Yaacov: Yeah, it sounds like you have a lot of experience, and I know my team has been working with your team. We have been working together to take advantage of the new extensibility model, and I think the new Outlook is a very important component for the strategy of new extensibility model. And I think for IT people in the audience but also for end user, Outlook has been this stable anchor in the Microsoft workplace. And all of the sudden there is a new Outlook. We thought Outlook will never change, it will always be here and now there is a new Outlook. So can you tell us about the new Outlook?

Juan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's not also a drastic change. No, I think it's a natural evolution of the product. As you know today, what we are calling the new Outlook, it's basically a unification of the Outlook code base.

It’s like today across the different platforms we support Windows, web, Mac, and online and mobile. Each of them have a different feeling, a different user experience. Sometimes one has features that the other doesn't. So in general, one of the goals was to basically consolidate all these different platforms into a single experience, into a unified experience, no?

And at the same time, each of those products that I was mentioning has different cycles of engineering. So as you know, the web clients are the ones that are getting the updates faster than others. In the Windows case for example, depending on the subscription mode that you are, you can get updates a year after they were published in the multichannels.

So basically with this unification, which is not only a consolidation of the UX of the experience, it's also unification of the code, that single code base that today we have again code base for each of those platforms. So from the engineering perspective, it's also providing a lot of benefits and the ability for our customers to get the latest updates faster, which is something that we have been struggling now a little bit.

So I think those are the two. And basically what's happening right now is that our web client is going to be in essence the essence of the new Outlook. So the rest of the platforms are going to be some sort of a frame of the Outlook on the web experience. So that has some consequences, no? That design decision that we will talk a little bit more when we talk about extensibility, but that's basically, yeah.

Yaacov: So I guess that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, that when as IT people which are managing Microsoft 365 and managing the clients, so basically the new Outlook is a layer on top of the Outlook web and there is a unification of all the Outlooks, what that means?

So let's talk about what that means for the IT people, As an IT person, if you’re using plugins for dynamics, or for Salesforce, conference tools plugins, or security plugins, or productivity plugins like harmon.ie, what do I need to do? I need to refresh these plugins?

Juan: Well, yes. So one of the consequences of the design that I was mentioning is that the COM add-in model or the PSTO add-in model that we used to have is no longer going to be supported in the new Outlook. So in the new Outlook, the only extensibility model that’s going to be supported is the web add-in platform. So all the ISVs, all different people in our community who have already invested in creating a web add-in product, like you for example, all that investment is going to carry over to the new Outlook, because that's the model that’s going to be supported.

So for IT, one of the main consequences is that they will have to start working on finding alternatives to their COM add-in offers into web add-ins. Our team has been working very diligently with a lot of ISVs with the top used add-ins, Outlook add-ins out there until different segments. And we have been enabling the platform so that they can actually transition successfully their commands into web add-ins.

It's a journey that we are doing right now but something that definitely is happening. So as an IT, basically what you need to do is to analyze the inventory of add-ins around your organization, whether they are from third parties or maybe also coded internally, and try to start finding an equivalent and trying to start moving those existing comm add-in into web add-ins. So that's going to come up obviously with the benefit of the consistency of the experience. The deployment models for web add-ins are way better than the comm model add-ins used to be right now today because it, it's still supported and will still be supported.

And then all you'll also get the faster delivery of fixes and value across all the endpoints, no?

Yaacov: So basically, this is a new add-in model which is web-based. And it's going to be a unified model for not just staff Outlook but for all Office. And we are the ISV community, people like us, we are working diligently to support. I remember we started in 2013, but now the model has matured a lot and we were talking about some of the things which we have seen coming from Microsoft, like the ability to have persistent add-ins, web add-ins, which are persistent, the ability to drag and drop.

I think that's also the other thing we wanted to talk about is how do you support the ISV community to really catch the train for the new add-in model, and what's overall your vision to support the Microsoft ecosystem?

Juan: Well, evidently, we are, it's in our top interest that all our ISVs have the ability to get into the new web add-in model. What basically the approach that the team has been doing is to basically—well, first of all, we know today what are the COM add-ins that are most popular by usage out there in the markets.

So we have two efforts, two very big efforts going on right now. The first one is basically trying to make sure that the add-ins that have the most usage have everything they need to be created as a web add-in, transition from a COM add-in to a web add-in. So basically, add-ins that are in the security space, in the spam reporting, DLP types of scenarios, encryption and classification, all of those types of add-ins right now should be in a very good position to be moved to web add-ins.

The next category are the online meeting providers, and all these add-ins that allow you to create online meetings should also have a perfect segue into web add-ins as well as productivity, and harmon.ie in this case is one of the ISVs that has been very successful in the COM model.

So in fact we are working with you very closely with your team trying to identify essential gaps that your product has, in this case the contextless add-ins, we were discussing multi-select in Outlook that you can activate items when you select multiple items on the explorer views, drag and drop. So we are having this kind of communication with our key customers and partners and basically adding the gaps to our backlog and basically enabling them.

Something that we have not talk about here, it's when that transition is going to happen. So what is a time line for one Outlook?

Yaacov: Actually, Juan, this is one of the questions - when will Microsoft release the new Outlook? I think people want to know about how much time they have to refresh these plugins.

Juan: Yes, that's a great question. So actually, if you today install the Outlook that is in preview, you will see that there's a button at the top that says you know, want to try the new Outlook? And when you click on that, obviously by IT I can enable or disable that option. But if you want to try it, you can try it today and you can try your web add-ins today.

What I'm trying to say is that we don't have a set date right now. We don't know, I cannot tell you an exact day on when that transition is going to happen. I do know that it is going to happen, and the way that my team visualizes that is that it's kind of a journey right now. So I would say at some point it's going to become mainstream. I think that's going to happen within the next two years. So today is the perfect timing to be engaging with my team around trying to communicate different gaps that you might have and issues that you might have during those transitions so that we can have a plan for it.

Yaacov: Well, that's a good point. So if an IT organization has developed its own plugin, we are going to share a survey link, right, so they can communicate with your team, Juan?

Maya will post the link of the survey for anybody which wants to talk about a specific in-house developed plugin in an IT organization. So you can fill up this survey and we will make sure Juan’s team gets it.

Juan: Exactly, Yaacov, so that goes back to my second, I was telling previously that we have two big efforts going on. The first one is to identify the top ISVs and make sure to enable them, and the second one is to reach out to the community and have conversations with people. We have the survey that hopefully you can share with this community and that survey is basically one way of approaching my team and start a discussion and say, you know what, Juan, we need to, please can you guys have this, and we can have a conversation about what we need to do.

Yaacov: Yes, so I have some questions here from the audience about Office 365, government cloud. So will the schedule with, so you have been saying it will take a couple of years. I see one participant is concerned about the discontinuation of Outlook desktop in the government cloud.

Juan: I don't think that there's going to be a discontinuation as such, and if it does it's going to happen in—we're not, obviously we don't want to affect drastically anybody. So in the government clouds, the adoption of this type of features is a bit slower than in the usual channels. So I think we're going to have a specific timeline for that, but the other excuse that we have on the other environments, I think it's going to be a bit faster than the government clouds.

Yaacov: Okay. Yeah, so government cloud I think—

Juan: Great question, by the way.

Yaacov: Yeah, it's a good point. They’re going to have a little more time. But anyway, as you said, I think if I summarize, you're saying this is a process. You understand that a lot of organization are invested in COM add-ins and in Outlook desktop. And Microsoft in one hand wants to move to the new model, on the other hand respects the constraints and going to working with top ISVs to make this transition as smooth as possible, right?

Juan: Yes.

Yaacov: Yeah, okay, good. So I have a question also about add-ins for Excel. I get that's the same thing, COM add-ins. So it's the same thing.

Juan: Well, no. This transition is going to happen specifically in Outlook. In Excel we don't have anything similar going on right now. So in Excel it is not yet clear what's going to happen.

Yaacov: So you can keep doing the COM add-ins in Excel?

Juan: Right now there is no plan like we have in Outlook. Everything that I mentioned in this call by the way is affecting—only one Outlook project is the organization that is going to be affected right now. Nothing of what I said applies to, although we are doing a similar effort. We have a lot of resources working in Excel and Word and PowerPoint. This transition of not supporting COM add-ins, it's only in the Outlook space at this point.

Yaacov: Yeah, I think some people are saying we want Outlook to have all the features of desktop Outlook, for example offline, the ability to access email even when you're offline.

Juan: Yes. The team is working on providing those capabilities now. So also in parallel of what I'm doing, I'm focusing more on the extensibility part. So there's another group of PMs who are actually working precisely into that essential features that we have in the Windows platform that we want to carry over into the one Outlook, and offline absolutely is in that list.

Yaacov: Okay, good. And maybe a last question here, there's a lot of interest in the new Outlook, like offline mode is really important for a lot of people. Will the new Outlook also be on Mac and when this will happen?

Juan: I don't have again a specific date, but I just shared with you more or less how the project's going to be. I mean, as we have more clarity, we have ways of communicating with our community. Thank you, I appreciate so much you inviting me here because I can reach more people, but in our community my team has a monthly community call. We always talk about these types of issues and when we have more clarity, we'll share it. Absolutely.

Yaacov: Okay, so excellent. I think the overall message is that journey, you have been working with harmon.ie, you are working with all the leading ISVs to help them, and I can testify that you have been really helpful.

We still have a couple of things we’re waiting on; we want the drag and drop, it's really important for us. So everything is coming into place, bulk cooperation, drag and drop, consistency. And I think it has been amazing to see that Microsoft, a giant company, is able to really deal with a lot of ISVs, which in our case we have 600,000 people using our COM add-ins. So that's quite a number.

Juan: Amazing.

Yaacov: And we think we are going to get soon to the 1 million mark and 1600 organization worldwide. So it's good to hear that you have the big picture in mind and a lot of responsibility in your shoulders.

Juan: Yes, and it's really I think since many years already, there was this transition in how we approach our communities at Microsoft, and having this direct access with everybody and being super transparent about what we are doing and effectively delivering everything that we are saying is like it's what we love to do. It's like all the team, I mean I'm just 1:00 PM here kind of talking with you about it, but it's really a huge team that is behind me that is also super excited to help you guys and making sure that the transition to one Outlook is as smooth as possible. We know that add-ins are essential, we know that in many cases our mission is critical, so we are super conscious about it and we want to have a great story for that.

Yaacov: So thank you very much, Juan. I know you need to go to your next meeting, so I want to thank you. If we have more question, we will send them your way, and we'll also, feel free, everybody, survey has been shared in the chat so if you have developed your own plugins and you want to ask features and you want to ask about the new web add-in architecture, we will get that in the way to Juan. And I think the good news is we're having this call with the community and if needed we'll do another call with the community. And we are going to continue to work together to enrich—we want to work together to continue to enrich and enhance and Microsoft 365 workplace. So thank you, Juan.

Juan: Absolutely, Yaacov. Thank you so much for inviting me and thank you everybody for listening to our message and have a great rest of the webinar. Thank you so much.

Yaacov: So what we want to talk about next is we want to talk about the new harmon.ie for the new Outlook. And we have been working with Microsoft, we started actually in 2013 working on the new web add-in architecture, and the last year has been a lot more intense, and the idea really is to bring a new harmon.ie which will work with the new Outlook.

It will work also with Outlook desktop, Outlook on the Mac, even eventually Outlook mobile. So that's the idea, and this new harmon.ie has been designed from the ground up for Microsoft 365 and really what we have done is we have been gathering all our experience working with hundreds of thousands of users. Today we have 600,000 users using harmon.ie desktop across 1600 organizations. Wehave been working with some of the largest Microsoft 365 shops. And what we have learned is that there is a need to really focus on the end user because Microsoft 365 is very rich with a lot of application, but at the end of the day, the business end user can be overwhelmed by all these applications and by all this rich functionality.

Find, Share, Organize

So in order to succeed what we have seen is really, in order to succeed in your Microsoft 365 initiative is you need to deliver a cross-app experience. So an experience which is more stable where you don't need to toggle between apps, and for business users, which may not be the most technical users, we need an easy way to find, share, and organize apps across Microsoft 365. And really the way to do it is what we have been doing, and we will do that to the next level with harmon.ie cloud is to bring first within Outlook but we will bring this experience across Teams, across Office application, is really to bring all the Microsoft cloud and all its richness in one place, starting with Outlook. And really having the ability to search across apps. So I can search, if I'm looking for a document and I don't remember if this document came from an email or it was maybe in a team chat or maybe it was in a OneDrive share, I don't remember, or it was on SharePoint.

I need to be able to search across apps. And we have been working with the Microsoft search team and the API to really deliver the best cross-app experience using the Microsoft Exchange APIs and the Microsoft graph APIs to give you a cross-app search experience. But this is also the same thing for recent. For example, I want your users, they want to see the recent docs that they have been working on across apps. If they have worked in this app in Office, in Excel, in Word or in Teams or in SharePoint, they shared it from the SharePoint interface or from harmon.ie, you want one place to see recent across all apps. And that's what our Recent group will deliver.

Retention and Compliance

And when we talk about also Shared with Me where are so many ways today to share a document. You can do it by putting an attachment in an email. You can do it by putting a link in an email. Maybe it is in a SharePoint chat, in a team chat or in a teams channel or in a teams meeting or in SharePoint or OneDrive—doesn’t matter. You are going to have one Shared with Me place where you’re getting all these shared documents. It's like a virtual inbox across all the channels. And having the ability to see SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive in one place, having really a single place and have a single tree across all Microsoft repository for all my files. And we have seen that actually once you empower your user with cross-app experience, this also impact compliance and this impact also the organizational initiative because empowered users drive organizational compliance. In other words, if you want your enterprise, you have an email retention initiative, you have a compliance initiative, you have a life cycle management of documents, you want to manage emails and manage the life cycle of emails. In order to make compliance work, it has to be seamless, has to be very easy for user.

So that's really what we have seen and when we're working with some of the largest SharePoint and Microsoft 365 shops, they want to deliver the easiest possible user experience across Microsoft 365 to deliver better compliance, to deliver a seamless information management system, to be able to retain email and documents with ease, to manage the life cycle of information.

Because as you know today, in a hyper-regulated world that we're in, we need to manage the life cycle of our documents, the life cycle of our projects, of our folder. We need to classify and organize information with metadata and with retention policies, and the easier it is for the user to comply, the more they will actually follow compliance, because if it's difficult to do, they're not going to do it. In our society today, which are very focused on the individual, we need to make sure the individual is in power in order to achieve our corporate goals.

And in order to make it easy, we think, and I was talking to Juan, how drag and drop is critical, having a persistent harmon.ie cloud sidebar within one Outlook, within any Outlook, and being able to take an email or to take an attachment and to very easily upload it to the Microsoft cloud. Regardless if I want to put it on a Teams file, if I want to put this document on a SharePoint document library, I want to have— being in Outlook give us a very easy access to emails, to attachments and a lot of the company information, a lot of the outside world is communicating via email. So being able to very easily upload documents to Teams files, upload documents to SharePoint document libraries, that's really making the adoption of the Cloud, adoption of Microsoft 365, a lot easier.

Searching Across M365 Apps

The other thing as we spoke, we are spending a lot of time with a new design team which came on onboard at harmon.ie and they’re working, a new product management team, to really try to get the best of our experience. Working for the past 12 years, we have been working with a lot of the leading Microsoft 365 organizations and enterprises. At the same time, we want to have a look and feel which the people onboarding in the workplace use. They're going to really like having a redesigned user experience, using a lot of the design systems and design methodology which has been innovated, which has come to work. So search as you type, being able to use @ with a name, and being able to filter by app, something we introduced in harmon.ie desktop a year ago where you can actually look at the results by app. So I can focus on results from Teams. This way I can discover a channel I didn't know about.

So search and delivering search not only across SharePoint and Teams and OneDrive, but also maybe it's in an email. So I want to, we are doing a lot of work behind the scenes to bring information from Exchange using the Exchange APIs.

Save emails to M365

The other thing to make compliance easy, we are using drag and drop, but also we're making it very easy to save emails. Saving emails on Teams or SharePoint require a mapping of email fields to SharePoint columns, email things being from, to, subject. So we're introducing and this is going to be also available in harmon.ie desktop. In harmon.ie cloud, we're introducing a very easy way—harmon.ie will automatically map the email fields to the SharePoint columns without the need to ask admin help. In Teams, for example, there is, it's very independent to create our own Teams. People are saving documents in files and there is an ability also to apply metadata even at the user level.

So we are making it a lot easier to drag and drop an email into a document library and automatically to apply the email mapping. So user will be able to have a view of all the emails they shared in a SharePoint document library or in Teams. They will have a view which is an email view with from, to, subject and so on. So that's a very important feature we're adding.

The other thing we are seeing, and I've been talking recently to a number of customer which are really struggling how to organize and to manage the proliferation of files in Teams. So Teams has been growing exponentially during COVID and it has been a very useful platform for meetings, but now we start to pay the price. From a user experience standpoint, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find documents in Teams, and for IT, is increasingly difficult to take control of all this information being shared in Teams. Because at the end of the day, we still need to be compliant with retention policies.

Organize Teams Files in a Snap

So how long do we retain this document? We need to make sure that confidential documents are being managed properly and in one end this very collaborative way of working with Teams, which is very beneficial, very spontaneous. On the other end we need to find a way for IT to manage these documents.

So what we are introducing in harmon.ie cloud is to, thanks to the work Microsoft has been doing to make it easy to apply metadata in Teams, in the file type of Teams, we are really enabling to save emails into Teams. We are making it easy to apply metadata to files into Teams, and we are going to make it easy to chat and talk about, hey, this is the document I posted, and at the same time to apply metadata in a very intuitive way, because a lot of time people have seen it as it's either metadata and organization, something organized, or it has to be totally wild and spontaneous. And we're trying to find a way together with all the advances we're seeing in Microsoft to have an ability to make it easy for user to share a document in a chat but also to make it very easy to apply metadata as the way we have done it for SharePoint.

So normal trade off between SharePoint and Teams.

The other thing, Corey, actually, our new product manager, has initiated to make it really easy to, we are spending a lot of time looking for documents in Teams. They may be in chat and meetings and they become difficult to find. So we are going to have the ability, there's a Teams tab to have a view of all the documents which has been shared with you in Teams.

A Brand New User Experience

So also while working with our designers on a brand new user experience, for example, having file preview on hover so you hover over a file name and you stay a couple of seconds on it. So we will give you a view with high performance to show you what the document is all about. Maybe this is not the document you are looking for, you don't need to open it. You get a quick preview with some metadata.

Also having the ability within the sidebar Outlook to see, to have quick action which appear on hover, and quick share options to copy a link or to share to Teams. Anything can be shared to Teams. And as we spoke about search, as you type search by person, and also very important, we just launched with harmon.ie desktop a dark mode, which is very popular among IT people.

Installation, provisioning, security

So we are going to launch with both dark and light mode. And also what's important for IT, because it's complying with the Office web plugin extensibility, the Office extensibility model, they will be available within the Microsoft store. You get all the provisioning for Microsoft AppSource, you get automatic updates, and you have one harmon.ie add-in, which will work with one Outlook, with desktop, with Web, mobile and Mac. A lot easier to manage.

Also we have opted our R&D lead as research and came up with a single page architecture, which is really making sure the organization data never leave your tenant. So we have been working a lot on compliance with ISO 27001, with SOC 2, and we want to make sure that our customers are getting—a lot of our customers have security and privacy concern.

So with the single page architecture, the organization data, your emails never leave your tenant, we not bringing the emails to our cloud. It's all staying in your Microsoft 365 tenant. Because it's a single page architecture, we're reducing the wrong trips with the server. We're trying to optimize when we refresh the UX, and this to give you a really powerful performance. And hopefully…I will confess that I was supposed to show you today harmon.ie cloud, and Murphy’s Law, he didn't work, he worked all week but before the webinar he didn't work.

So hopefully tomorrow we'll have a European webinar and we'll show it then.

So I see we have a lot of questions coming in, but just to finish up, we're going to make it very easy to install for the Microsoft AppSource update and eventually we'll make it available in all the Microsoft apps, not just Team. It will be available on Teams, and we are looking at other use cases where it will be valuable to get all your files, all your Microsoft 365 in one place.

The other thing is we’ve been working with Microsoft, we have already in the build that we start to test internally and we will be opening up next year in Q1 a design panel program. So if you want to help shape the future of harmon.ie cloud, and we have already some large customer which are part of it, they want to make sure they get their favorite features available. So please apply. It will be, again, Maya will share a link so you can apply to this design partner program. We're going to maybe have a get together in Tel Aviv for this program. So it's going to be a very, very cool program.