Best apps for Office365 users

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I’m using Outlook for email and calendar, but I’d love to use another app. The reason I don’t currently:

  • I often need to see the profile of the person (when you single click another person who works at the same company, it tells you their role and contact details)
  • I work at a biggish company, and it’s nice to put a face to the name. My company loads everyone’s staff picture so it shows up in Outlook
  • We have a transparency policy, meaning everyone’s calendar is set to share full calendar details which is often helpful when booking meetings.

Do any other apps other than Outlook support these features? I’d love to use Fantastical / Spark but would really miss the above features such that I’d end up maintaining both if the apps didn’t support these.

Thanks!

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You can use them both concurrently. You might find that calendar entry centric tasks are better performed in something like Fantastical. In the same vein your email processing might be better done in spark.

Fantastical shows busy/free status when making an appointment, by the way.

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I’m going the concurrent route, as Matthew suggests. I use the Office 365 web app for email, only because my firm’s case management system has a plugin that works best with it. But I use Fantastical on a second monitor, because I enjoy using it and like some of the features, like natural language and auto-starting Zoom meetings. And I use Mail or Outlook when I want to drag a message into DEVONthink, which doesn’t happen too often.

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I’m also on the concurrent boat. I mostly use Airmail and Fantastical with Office365. One thing I’ve found is the integration with between Zoom and Fantastical seems to work better than the integration between Zoom and Microsoft Outlook. I use Microsoft Outlook on my Mac when I need to see someone else’s calendar, run a mail-merge, or want an alternative view of my email.

To address your bullets:

  • Outside of Outlook (app or web), I haven’t a way to do this in-app. If you have Contacts set to sync, you can have go into the Contacts app, and do a search in your Office365 Global Address List.

  • Again, I haven’t found away to do this outside of Outlook.

  • The calendar settings are on the server-side, so others can see your calendar, even if you do not use the Outlook app. In the previous Office365 environments I was able to access other people’s calendars regardless of the app I used. However, in my currently Office365 environment, I can only see availability in Fantastical. If I want to see a person’s whole calendar, I have to use Microsoft Outlook.

TL;DR: You’ll need to stick with Outlook to get all of the features you want or will need to maintain multiple apps.

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