It"s no secret at this point that Microsoft really, really wants you to switch to the new Outlook experience, which began deploying by default back in May for Microsoft 365 customers using Windows. Although Microsoft has been working on feature parity with the old version and going beyond that, many think that the app is still "hot garbage". Now, the Redmond tech giant is trying another way to woo customers and partners into switching to the new experience.
For starters, Microsoft has highlighted a streamlined interface that integrates with Redmond"s AI tooling and reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO). If you"ve been following our Ignite 2025 coverage, you probably know that Microsoft unveiled a bunch of Copilot features for Outlook today, so you"ll be able to take advantage of all of them soon. In addition, the tech firm believes that its partner ecosystem leveraging Outlook will benefit a wider audience across multiple platforms, thanks to Outlook"s extensibility.
To that end, Microsoft has encouraged partners to leverage its App Assure service so that they can switch to the new Outlook experience with the functionalities of their COM add-ins intact, resulting in no downtime. For those unaware, App Assure is a free-of-cost service offered by Microsoft itself so that it can directly work with customers to ensure that their existing tooling is compatible with newer platforms and services. This includes end-to-end testing and existing validation, owned and managed by Microsoft. App Assure is fairly popular across Windows 365 and Windows 11 already.
Microsoft claims that many of its customers and partners have worked with its engineers through its App Assure platform already to ensure that their COM add-ins are translated to web add-ins and work flawlessly in the new Outlook. You can reach out to Microsoft through achelp@microsoft.com to avail the same services.