Microsoft has offered a status update on the rollout of the new Outlook.com. The update was announced over a year ago, and while the rollout of the new web portal began earlier this year, only a small group of people seem to have received the update. Speaking with ZDNet, Microsoft's Jon Orton explained how the company is conducting this rollout.
Moving existing Outlook.com users to the new Outlook.com "is just more than a facelift," Orton said. "The scope is much bigger than the previous Hotmail-to-Outlook.com transition. It's not just the UI and experience we're migrating. We are moving data to the Office 365 base."The existing Outlook.com service was running on a legacy infrastructure, Orton said. The new Outlook.com is using "the same building blocks as the rest of Office 365," he said. The result will be that new features can more quickly and easily be introduced across both Outlook/Office 365 and Outlook.com, moving forward, rather than building twice for two different platforms
The updated Outlook.com experience is meant to bring the web app closer to the Outlook desktop app, adding new features like themes, automatically adding flight confirmations, and more. Microsoft has not announced when it expects the rollout of the new web app to be complete.
