Microsoft's Outlook.com Will Soon Be Powered by Office 365: Report

Microsoft might soon make some changes to its Outlook.com website in order to streamline the service with its Office 365 platform. The firm is likely to change the user interface and the technology behind the service later this year to match the Outlook Web App offered with Office 365.

According to The Verge, Microsoft will be migrating its Outlook.com users to Office 365 to keep all the three services - Outlook.com, Exchange, and Office 365 - perfectly aligned and offer consistent experience. As per the report, the Outlook.com service will retain its current domain and name, but will be powered by Office 365 technology without the subscription benefits of Office 365.

As for the user interface, the company's General Manager of Office Apps, Rob Lefferts, in an interview with the publication speculated there may be several changes, saying, "I expect there will be some visual enhancements... We debated a couple of ways we could have gone about it, but given the other goals we have for Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook.com it seemed like the most straightforward way to do it."

The move, if real, ties in with Microsoft's earlier announcement at Build 2015 to provide support for third-party add-ins and apps for Outlook for desktop and Office 365, with developers able to create a single app that works across the platforms. The company had tipped this functionality for Outlook.com as well.

Notably, the Redmond-based tech firm has not made any updates in its Outlook.com service for months. The firm in February killed the support for Google and Facebook chat in Outlook.com. Unfortunately, the company did not mention the reason to discontinue the integration with Facebook chat. In the case of Google, Microsoft cited discontinuation of chat protocol used by the Google Talk platform in the shift to Google Hangouts as the reason for dropping support.