Microsoft says latest Outlook for Windows performance upgrade is its “biggest change since 1997”

Microsoft has announced that its Outlook app for Windows is about to receive a massive update, with several performance enhancements and feature improvements in tow. The company’s email app has been testing these updates for over two years now, which are rolling out to users today.

The company explained in a post on the Microsoft Community that while it had announced the Outlook for Windows client in preview form, it had kept these features opt-in until now, while it fixed bugs reported by several thousand users during this period.

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Referring to these changes as the “biggest change to Outlook for Windows since its initial release in 1997”, the company says that it wanted to be cautious about the release. The performance improvements have been on other clients for a while now, including the macOS desktop app.

Microsoft says that with the new update, calendars will sync faster and managing calendars from inside the app should be much more consistent. The company hasn’t shared any specific numbers in comparison to older Outlook builds, but it says that syncing latency has been reduced, while the reliability of shared calendars or delegated calendars has been improved.

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The company also says that it hopes that users won’t even notice that something has changed, calling it one of the updates that should be “invisible” since it doesn’t change the way the main product works. “Right now, about 10% of Outlook for Windows users in Current Channel with version 2103 have been enabled for those improvements, and we’ll keep expanding gradually throughout the spring and summer,” the company explains.