Microsoft looks to bring Office 365 and Windows 10 much closer together

Windows 10

Microsoft has plans to bring Office 365 and Windows 10 much closer together by introducing an 'Office Hub' to the operating system.

At least that's the current thinking at Redmond according to Windows Central, although this concept is still in the very early planning stages, so could well change going forward.

But it certainly makes sense to more tightly integrate Office 365, and this potential Office Hub would ensure you have quick and easy access to all your documents, spreadsheets, emails and so forth from within Windows. The idea is that the hub will also highlight things such as when colleagues are working on shared documents in OneDrive.

Where would such a hub live? The vague ideas at the moment – and we must stress again that these are early concepts – are to either place it in the Action Center, or tie it into Cortana's hamburger menu.

Possible timeframe

Ideas are being played with at Redmond right now, but it's unclear how far down the line this hub might be, and whether it's something we could expect to see in the next major Windows 10 update – that would be Redstone 2 which is due to land early next year.

We are betting that if it does come to fruition, such a feature will probably be further down the line than RS2. There are, after all, two major updates scheduled for next year, with RS3 due to pitch up in the summer of 2017 (RS1, incidentally, was the recent Anniversary Update).

Microsoft also has further plans to deepen Office integration into Windows search, allowing users to search for terms such as 'all emails from this week', and have the OS pull out all of said messages.

Via: Win Beta

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).