Outlook Mobile in iOS now supports offline search capabilities, even for organizations where admins have disabled Apple’s Spotlight capability using Intune. While these capabilities are limited to keyword searching (for now), it unblocks users from finding critical information even when they’re offline.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 153121
[When this will happen:]
Standard Release: This is currently rolling out and expected to complete by late October 2023.
[How this will affect your organization:]
If admins in your organization have disabled Apple’s Spotlight capability for iOS users (using Intune), it meant that offline search in Outlook Mobile iOS was not available to users impacted by this disablement. This limitation is now lifted, and such users would be able to use offline search. However, this experience is limited and has the following caveats:
- Keyword search works as expected.
- Clicking on a people suggestion does not work and would not display results correctly.
- Using filters (like “Has Attachments”) while searching would not work in offline mode.
We’re working to further improve our offline search capabilities, add address these known limitations in the future.
[What you need to do to prepare:]
No admin preparation is needed, this update will be automatically rolled out. Users would need to update their applications to version 4.2328.0 or later to avail this feature.
