Welcome back to our weekly look back at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap site as we check out some new posts. This week, the site has some new features that it says will be added to the Outlook email client. We already reported on some upcoming features in the past week like Outlook themes generated by AI via Copilot and that a previously announced offline email sync feature would be available in late December as a preview.
This week on the roadmap website, Microsoft stated that more advanced mail merge features are coming to the new Outlook Windows app as well as the web in April 2025.
Mail Merge (Basic) will be enhanced to allow fields to be replaced by values per email address. When Mail Merge (Advanced) is launched, not only will all recipients receive their own email with only their email address in the recipient list, but emails can be further customized to include content such as their name.
Outlook for Windows and the web is adding another new feature in December that will let users “manually insert a signature into a calendar event” as they currently can in the “classic” Outlook Windows app. Also in December, the iOS and Android mobile Outlook apps will finally allow those versions to sync the order of their folders so that they are the same as the order of the other Outlook apps they use.
Microsoft Teams will also get some improvements in December for admins across all their platforms:
We’re expanding the existing ‘Meeting Chat’ control in the Teams Admin Center with two new values, “Only for meetings for everyone” and “Only for meetings except anonymous users.” In the Teams Admin Center, admins will see a setting called ‘Meeting Chat’ under Meetings > Meeting Policies > Meeting Engagement. Administrators can now choose from five options in the ‘Meeting Chat’ setting: (1) “On for everyone” (2) “On for everyone except anonymous users” (3) “Off” (4) “Only for meeting for everyone” ” ( 5) “Only for meetings except anonymous users.” Administrators can select the values ”Only in the meeting” to disable the ability of participants to send messages in the meeting chat to meetings organized by specific users in their tenant If these “Meeting Only” values are selected, participants can read past chat history, but no one can send messages in the meeting chat unless the meeting is active.
In November, the desktop and Mac versions of Teams will get some Copilot AI bot chat improvements:
Custom engine agents and Teams bots can now stream responses like Microsoft Copilot. They can provide real-time updates on their actions while delivering parts of the response as they generate it, making interactions feel faster and more engaging.
Teams for the desktop and Mac platforms will also get some improvements to the clock in November, which will include a “more comprehensive and detailed view of your scheduling data.”
That’s it for this week’s look at the Microsoft 365 roadmap site.