If you have the Office 365 subscription service, you get updates every month. We’re going to look at 2 new ones: Focused Inbox and Adding Links to Documents.

I’ve recently noticed I’m starting to get an email that notifies me of the new Office 365 updates and to go and read about them. I really like this, otherwise, I just stumble upon it when doing what I usually do and I half-way notice that something seems a bit different!

Focused Inbox

Focused inbox in Outlook.com on the web

In the May update, they introduced the Focused Inbox. I had already noticed it on the web, but not on my desktop Outlook. Reading about the update, it said if you don’t have it, maybe your admin disabled it. I went to look at my Business Office 365 Admin area and it was disabled. I did enable it so I could try it out.

Focused inbox appeared instantly in my  web Office 365 business account, but not on my desktop Outlook yet. I read in this article from Outlook expert, Diane Poremsky, that I may need to run a PowerShell command to get it working. When you do see it on desktop Outlook, you’ll be able to move items from one box to another to “train” it. There’s an image further below on what it looks like.

To be clear, the focused inbox applies to Outlook 2016 — so you will have it whether you use Outlook with the business Office 365 or the Home Office 365. See my article here where I go through the differences among all the products. It can be confusing!

When I went to one of my outlook.com accounts on the web, the focused inbox was already working. If you want to disable it on the web go over to the right, where it says, Filter and a box will pop up where you can choose to show it or not. Read More →