Office features coming in update to Windows Phone

Microsoft will add more Office features to Windows Phone 7 in an update later this year, the company said today at its Tech Ed conference in Atlanta.

With the new features, Windows Phone users will be able to do the following:

• Pin email folders to the phone's home screen.
• Thread email in Outlook based on conversation, a feature called "Conversation View" in Outlook 2010.
• Search your entire inbox. Instead of just searching through the email stored on the phone, the search feature will search through all the emails on your Outlook Exchange server.
• Access Microsoft's unified communications software Lync. Windows Phone users will be able to access Lync, Microsoft's instant messaging, voice and video call and conference calling software for businesses. Incidentally, Skype, which Microsoft said it was buying for $8.5 billion last week, is not yet available as an app on Windows Phone 7.
• Protect email with complex passwords. The update will support complex passwords that include both letters and numbers.
• Use Office 365, Microsoft's cloud version of Office coming later this year.

The Tech Ed conference is for information technology professionals and developers.

Microsoft plans to make more announcements about the Mango update to Windows Phone 7 on May 24 in New York. The release will include Twitter integration in the address book, multitasking and the Internet Explorer 9 mobile browser, which Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer talked about at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Here is our earlier coverage from Spain.

The company has not said when users will receive the updates. Many users complained about confusion around the last update called, NoDo. Here is an earlier story on the problems with that update.

Microsoft highlighted the new phone features in a blog post Monday.

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