After today’s shutdown of the Sunrise application and Microsoft’s acquisition, the company made it known that an upgrade will be made available for the Outlook application to feature event icons, integrate Bing map, and another thing called ‘Interesting Calendars’ amongst others that are also Sunrise inspired.
This ‘Interesting Calendars’ were at first made available on the web on Outlook in the early part of this month particularly for new Outlook.com and Office 365 accounts. As at present, it is being made available for mobile.
With the new feature, users of Outlook mobile will be enabled to subscribe to different event calendars like TV shows, sports teams and the rest.
There is only provision for iOS for Outlook app at the moment with a version for Android to follow soon. Users are required to possess an email address from Office 365 while those with email accounts with Outlook.com can make use of the feature in the later part of the year. Gmail users will also join according to Microsoft.
‘Interesting Calendars’ are not the only things to be expected on Outlook as it will also work with Bing Maps so that planning your place of meeting and location of booked appointments will be made easy.
To be able to use this feature, you have to start by typing the name of the event you want to create and then the event will be left for Outlook to update with a map. When the time for the meeting is at hand, you simply tap on the map and you will be directed to the place of the meeting from wherever you prefer to go through.
With the new app, users can easily schedule appointments in new ways and this is all thanks to Sunrise design of time pickers and new date, Microsoft said.
Event icons as obtainable with Sunrise will also be available in the new release. So for whatever event you are creating, there will be a matching icon to represent it.
With the icons, it will be easier to know at a glance the type of meeting you have for the day. Microsoft said users of Sunrise will notice that there is a difference in this feature.
With the new updates, users will be able to edit meetings that are recurring from their mobile device with an ability to create events that are recurring coming soon. Also Skype for Business will soon debut as well although meetings on Skype by calls are already functional.
Apart from the 75% users that are making use of Skype for Business at the moment, Microsoft says other fractions that are remaining will soon join.
Outlook does not still meet up with the startup offering that Sunrise users had. These users cannot attach an iCloud account if it does not have an email because emails are what Microsoft is looking for.
There is yet some integration that is yet to be found on the app. Things like Eventbrite, Triplt, ToDoList, etc are missing. Even Facebook events are not properly displayed.
Microsoft has sought to amend this by asking users to request for their favourite features that they want included in the app.
