Microsoft Brings ‘Likes’ And ‘Mentions’ To Outlook On The Web

You can ‘Like’ posts on Facebook and ‘Favourite’ Tweets on Twitter, so why not whack that feature onto emails? That’s exactly what Microsoft has done with Outlook on the web. The email service is getting a social media treatment with the addition of ‘Likes’ and ‘Mentions’. God help us. Here’s the lowdown.

If you thought you could escape the social media scene by sticking with emails, think again. Outlook on the web is getting a social media treatment with a new ‘Like’ button to inform others on an email thread know that you approve of a particular message and a ‘@Mentions’ feature that allow you to call out individuals in an email.

The ‘Like’ button has an image of a thumbs-up, which everybody with Facebook would be familiar with. When someone in an email thread likes your post, you will be notified.

“The new Like feature in Outlook on the web provides an easy way to visibly endorse a specific email and call it out as something worth attention – perhaps a statement or idea you support,” according to the Microsoft Office Blog.

As for Mentions, you can use the ‘@’ symbol in followed by the name of someone in your contacts list to highlight that person in the body of an email. They will then be notified of this and the objective is to get the person’s attention so they will respond to messages they are mentioned in.

Office 365 First Release customers on a plan with Exchange Online will be getting the Like button from today while it will be rolled out to others progressively from late this month. Mentions will be deployed from mid-October.

My question is do we really need these ‘Like’ and ‘Mentions’ features in Outlook? Would you find them useful for your work emails? Let us know in the comments.