Welcome again to our weekly look back at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website as we check out some new entries. This week there are some new features on the site that it says will be added to the Outlook email client. We have already reported on some upcoming features this past week like Outlook themes generated by AI via Copilot, and that a previously announced offline email sync feature would become available by the end of December in preview.
This week on the roadmap site, Microsoft stated more advanced mail merge features are coming to the new Outlook Windows app as well as on the web in April 2025.
Mail Merge (Basic) will be improved upon to allow fields to be replaced by values per email address. When Mail Merge (Advanced) is launched, not only will every recipient receive their own email with only their email address in the recipients list, but the emails can further be personalized to include content such as their name.
Outlook for Windows and the web will add another new feature in December which 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 up the order of their folders so they are the same as the order on the other Outlook apps that they use.
Microsoft Teams will also get some improvements in December for admins across all of its platforms:
We are expanding the existing ‘Meeting chat’ control in Teams Admin Center with two new values, “In-meeting only for everyone” and “In-meeting only except anonymous users.” In Teams Admin Center, admins will see a setting called ‘Meeting chat’ under Meetings > Meeting Policies > Meeting Engagement. Admins can now select from five options in the ‘Meeting chat’ setting: (1) “On for everyone” (2) “On for everyone but anonymous users” (3) “Off” (4) “In-meeting only for everyone” (5) “In-meeting only except anonymous users.” Admins can select the “In-meeting only” values to disable participants’ ability to send messages in the meeting chat before or after the meeting, for meetings organized by specific users in their tenant. When one of these “In-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 time clock improvements in November that 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.