New Features in Outlook for Android
New features are coming to Outlook on Android so I wanted to take a minute to highlight the ones that have the biggest impact from a productivity perspective.
Sync Draft Folders
Now when you start an email on your mobile device you don't have to finish it there. The Drafts folders will be synchronized so you can pick up where you left off on your Windows machine, Chromebook, iPad, or whatever you're most comfortable with. This capability is a great way to take advantage of those small windows of time without having to inconvenience yourself later.
Office Lens in Outlook
Office Lens is the Microsoft application for capturing images, documents, and drawings from your mobile device. The addition of Office Lens support to Outlook cuts out unnecessary steps when sending images to others. Now rather than having to capture an image, create a draft, and then go back and find your image to attach it you'll be able to add the image right from your draft email.
I'm speculating on this next part but it would make perfect sense that the images would sync in your draft folder as mentioned previously. If so this could be a bigger feature than expected.
Quick Reply
A feature that has received positive reviews on Google applications is coming to Outlook on Android. You'll now be able to reply to emails with smart responses from a single button providing an experience more akin to chat than email. I use Quick Reply on a few of my apps and when I do it's been fairly useful. We'll keep an eye on how this feature develops. Personally, I'm hoping they bring Quick Reply to Teams...but that's a different post.
Office 365 Groups Calendars and OneNote Notebooks
This is a bit of a mouthful so let me explain. In Office 365 Groups (a type of SharePoint site) you have the ability to have shared calendars and OneNote notebooks. This update to the Outlook Android client will give access to those calendars and shared notebooks from Outlook. If you're working in a collaborative environment (and if not...we need to talk) this is a step in the right direction.
Thanks to the good people over at DroidLife for bringing this to my attention.