Microsoft has announced that users of the new Outlook.com experience will soon have improved support for handling files from Google Drive and photos from Facebook. The updates are going to be rolling out over the course of the next few weeks and it is a back end change so there is nothing you need to do. Once you have the update, Google Drive files will be available to you from the Attach menu when creating an email. Today when you want to do this you have to open a wholly separate tab. That will no longer be the case and it will make attaching files out of Google Drive quicker and simpler.
The other big change is being able to share your photos from Facebook in an Outlook.com email.
Google Drive Integration with Outlook.com
Once connected, you’ll be able to browse and attach your photos. Your photos will be organized just like they are in Facebook: “Photos of me” are the ones that you’ve been tagged in and “My photos” are the ones you’ve uploaded.
This will make it much easier for those who have a lot of photos in Facebook and want to share as before, you had to manually download then insert them into an email. This new integration will make life a bit easier.
Finally, there is dramatically improved tool for finding attachments in long email threads.
We want to make it as easy as possible to find a specific attachment in a conversation. At the top of every thread, you’ll now find an attachment icon. Click it to open a drop-down list of all the attachments in the conversation. Simply select the file you are looking for and open it—you don’t have to click though each reply or expand the thread.
As I mentioned before, all of these changes are rolling out to the new Outlook.com experience and will take a few weeks to happen. Not many have had the new experience yet (I’ve not) so this will be pretty limited until everyone sees the new UI. When that will happen remains a bit up in the air but it should be before the end of the year.
