Outlook Mobile heads to the White House, passes infosec clearance for federal sector

The US government may be enduring its longest shutdown in history, but federal workers can at least console themselves with Microsoft’s Outlook mobile app that has been given security clearance for use. That's for Android and iOS, of course; hard-pressed workers have suffered enough without having Windows Phone inflicted upon …

[dervheid]

Hamburgers

Surely it's only Hamberders they serve in the White House...

[Aladdin Sane]

Re: Hamburgers

Just came here to post this.

[Tom 35]

Re: Hamburgers

That and cold limp fries / chips.

[Cuddles]

Bing location services don’t work

Of course, that's not anything to do with the secure environment, it's just a standard feature across all versions.

[Dan 55]

Thought Outlook Mobile was cloudy and uses Azure even for on-premises Exchange accounts

So how did they get their approval?

[Michael B.]

Re: Thought Outlook Mobile was cloudy and uses Azure even for on-premises Exchange accounts

FEDRAMP is the approval process for cloudy applications that's why.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Thought Outlook Mobile was cloudy and uses Azure even for on-premises Exchange accounts

Nope - communicates directly with Exchange.

[Dan 55]

Re: Thought Outlook Mobile was cloudy and uses Azure even for on-premises Exchange accounts

No AC, you remember where MS first bought Acompli, it used an AWS instance to talk to the Exchange server and the app talked to the AWS instance. Then MS changed the backend to Azure but apart from that the architecture remained unchanged, it was still a cloud backend talking to the Exchange server and the app talking to the cloud backend.

And here is a diagram from MS themselves.

As it's unnecessary I would have thought approval would not have been forthcoming, but it seems they don't care that much.

[Ragarath]

Still waiting!

Still no shared mailbox access *sigh* it's not like they have a legion of developers or anything.

[carlos_c]

Re: Still waiting!

You can work around by connecting to shared mailboxes using IMAP - works a treat

[JAK 1]

Re: Still waiting!

Alas not whilst using Intune.....

Shared mailboxes are on the roadmap for Q2 though....

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Outlook, sadly, doesn't have any real competitors.

There just isn't anything on the desktop that does what Outlook does. And I hate that because I haven't yet seen any mail or calendar client that I don't find easier or more pleasant to use than Outlook. It's just foisted on people as the "well it comes with Office" option.

And because Outlook doesn't really have competitors, they can use it to lock people into Exchange email...

[cosymart]

Yeh, I was looking for a robust desktop email package and apart from Thunderbird outlook wins hands down :-)

[Maventi]

And it's a shame, because Outlook has never been very good at actual email at all. This has only improved slightly in the last couple of versions. It's the extra non-email bits that make it useful. Now if only they would finally fix contact searching and all those annoying modal dialog boxes.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

because Outlook has never been very good at actual email at all

Especially as it enables 'creative types' to set amusing coloured and patterned backgrounds to their emails..

(Grumble, grumble, email is 7-bit ASCII, grumble, grumble)

[Chung Leong]

We'll all benefit

Perhaps the fear of a nasty Trump tweet will finally convince Microsoft to test their stuff properly prior to release.

[macjules]

Re: We'll all benefit

He’s been surprisingly quiet for the past few days. Presumably he had to eat all the leftover burgers.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft has updated the security architecture for its on-the-go email botherer, Outlook, to satisfy the needs of both Office 365 US Government Community Cloud (GCC) High and the Department of Defense (DoD) environments."

Translation - they removed all Google and Apple transport dependencies and middleware.