Over the past year, the Microsoft Outlook mobile development team has helped you and your users provide a clear and distinct perspective between work and personal accounts in the Outlook mobile app. They also help users to identify external messages for security purposes and to prevent harmful threats from entering your networks. There are 4 categories of improvements to highlight here.
Change the account
To avoid sending company emails to your coworkers’ personal email accounts, Microsoft added visual cues when creating new emails and calendar invitations. When you send email from your Office 365 business account, there is a clear visual indication at the top of the email compose window indicating which account you are using.
If you use Intune app policies, you are not allowed to send from your personal email account, as shown in the lock code above. If the app detects data in the text or topic protected by the aforementioned policies, Outlook will prevent this data from being sent from the wrong account.
Disconnect the connection
For efficiency reasons, when creating new email messages and calendar invitations, only the contacts belonging to the account in use with auto-complete and searches will appear. If you are posting from your work account, there is a clear separation between your work contacts and your personal account. When you search your directory, you only see contacts and business users. This prevents your users from submitting to a colleague’s personal email account, which will not be on top of the professional Scale-O’-Meter.
The logo of the organization
Scheduled to be available in the second half of 2021, Microsoft will support your company branding logo to appear in the All Accounts view in Outlook and during creation events. This is another feature to help users keep their account easily identifiable.
Enterprise logos are defined in Azure Active Directory (AAD). If the dark theme box logo is configured, Outlook will use it when the app is configured for dark mode. When reviewing your logo, Microsoft does not recommend transparency unless the logo works well on white, light gray, dark gray, and black backgrounds. Transparent logos will appear on a light or dark background, depending on the app theme. Depending on the colors of the logo, this could be a problem with recognizing the logo. For more information on how to set up your branding for this and other activity, visit this link!
The external sender tag
Exchange Online recently released the ability to make external senders easier to identify for users. This will likely help users be more careful when clicking on external sender / spammer links. Outlook mobile was one of the first platforms to support this feature. After the Exchange admin in your organization enables it with the “Set-ExternalInOutlook” PowerShell cmdlet, users will see an external flag displayed for email messages from external senders.
If anyone has any questions about these new improvements, leave a comment!
