Microsoft rolls out performance upgrade to Outlook for Windows, "biggest change" since 1997

Back in 2019, Microsoft announced that it is updating Outlook for Windows with a number of enhancements, but up until now, these were only available in preview and customers had to manually opt in. Upgrades primarily revolved around shared calendars, headlined by smoother and more reliable synchronization, faster editing of an event, and other changes to the default behavior.

Now, Microsoft has announced that these improvements have graduated from preview and are available generally.

While the company hasn't quantified it, it says that the enhancements "dramatically" improve the sync latency and reliability of shared and delegated calendars in Outlook for Windows. It is important to note that these performance benefits have been available on other Outlook clients such as those on the web, Mac, and mobile for quite some time, and are now being rolled out on Windows as well.

The Redmond tech giant has touted these upgrades as the biggest change to Outlook for Windows since its first release in 1997 and says that it collected feedback and fixed bugs reported by tens of thousands of users in the past couple of years before removing the preview tag.

Microsoft says that the update does not change anything visually but performance enhancements will be visible to delegates and other users of shared calendars in Outlook for Windows. As of today, the performance benefits are enabled for 10% of customers utilizing Outlook for Windows in the Current Channel version 2103 (March 2021 update), and the enhancements will be rolled out to all users in a staggered manner throughout the rest of the year.