Outlook 2016 gets Uber, Paypal

Outlook 2016 users will be able to book an Uber ride to a meeting and pay a bill in a click or two.

Office 365 planner charts.

Outlook 2016 users will be able to effortlessly book an Uber ride to a meeting organised by email, pay an emailed bill with PayPal in a click or two, and instantly look up a sender’s profile on LinkedIn.

These are features in Windows’ new version of Office 2016, released today. The new Office puts the focus on connectivity, ­security and collaboration.

“The way people work has changed dramatically and that’s why Microsoft is focused on reinventing productivity and business processes for the mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella.

Several people can work on the same Word, Excel or PowerPoint document and instantly see changes made by one another.

Microsoft says it is bringing the real time co-authoring already available in Office Online to its Windows desktop apps.

Office 365 planner charts.

Collaborating on a document involves sending a co-collaborator an email with a link to the document stored on Microsoft’s consumer cloud service, OneDrive.

In other features, a user can quickly create a meeting, and fill in invitees from those in a particular email chain.

Invitees can opt to be sent a text message reminding them to order an Uber car. A click takes the user into the Uber app with the destination pre-filled. The Cortana personal assistant can even tell them when to leave.

Users who receive a bill by email can send a PayPal payment, adjusting currency if necessary, from within the Outlook app in a couple of clicks. Outlook also will translate emails using Microsoft’s Bing translation engine.

Social media platform LinkedIn also is integrated. Users can click a LinkedIn button to read the sender’s LinkedIn profile including their title and work details, and connect to them immediately.

Meetings in Skype can be set up from Outlook in a similar way. The new offering includes tools to find an email user’s ID on the Skype platform, so users can quickly call or Skype senders.

Word 2016: real-time typing and Skype for business

They can share documents with meetings from a preloaded list of recently worked on documents stored on OneDrive. The documents are sent as a link and users can restrict others to read-only viewing.

As well as the regular apps, Microsoft has new offerings such as Office 365 Planner which lets teams of employees plan their work days.

On September 30, Microsoft says it will release a new version of OneDrive for Business which offers both security to users and an ability for an enterprise to manage its cloud storage on premises.

It is also offering a futuristic cloud service called Gigjam as a private preview. It says Gigjam helps work teams accomplish tasks by breaking down the barriers between devices, apps and people using machine learning. Other features include Sway for Windows 10, which lets users to create magazine-like shareable, interactive stories

Office 2016 includes regular apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Visio and Access.

Co-authoring in Sway.

From today, Office 365 subscribers can download the new Office 2016 apps as part of their subscription and automatic updates will roll out to consumer and small-business subscribers from next month. Commercial customers will receive upgrades early next year. It is available also from selected Australian retailers.