Introducing Office 365 Groups in Outlook 2016

In my earlier blog post I mentioned about lot of new features that I liked including Groups in Outlook 2016 and a new mobile app called Outlook Groups which you can download. With the new Outlook Groups mobile app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, you can now engage with your group on your phone while on the go—continue conversations, view files, @mention colleagues and even discover other relevant groups etc. Below is the sample snapshot how it will looks like.

These new capabilities offer a better way to get work done with others and offer a number of benefits compared to traditional distribution lists. In Outlook 2016, creating a group is easy and new colleagues can also join existing groups and quickly get up to speed. Each member of a group can participate in conversations, schedule meetings, share files and notes and even initiate a Skype for Business voice and video call for urgent real-time decisions. You can have a look at the below video:

FAQ: Learn more about Outlook 2016 and its new Groups features here.

Download/try, make use of the Groups!!

Feature comparison: EWS vs. EWS Managed API

Are you a .Net Developer who develop custom application using Exchange Web Services (EWS) Managed API or EWS (Auto-generated proxies)? Then this is for you. The EWS Managed API provides an intuitive interface for developing client applications that use EWS. The API enables unified access to Exchange resources, while using Outlook–compatible business logic. In short, you can use the EWS Managed API to access EWS in versions of Exchange starting with Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1), including Exchange Online. However, do you know that not all features that are available in EWS are implemented in the EWS Managed API?

You can refer the above snapshot or related documentation identifies the EWS Managed API feature implementations that target different versions of Exchange. If the EWS Managed API does not implement a feature that you want to use, you might consider an auto-generated proxy object model.