Yesware and Microsoft’s Office 13

Microsoft Office has long been the workhorse of the sales world. We estimate that 95% of active salespeople use some version of Outlook. So we’ve naturally fielded questions about why Yesware is in Gmail only. “When are you going to be in Outlook?” is a question we get multiple times a day.

That time has come. With Steve Balmer’s announcement of the consumer preview of Office 2013 today, we can proudly show you the first version of Yesware for Office.

We are honored to be included as one of only 12 initial developers for the newest version of Outlook, and we look forward to working with Microsoft to bring Yesware to more salespeople all over the world.

Tom Warren from the Verge sums up the relative improvements in the Office suite: “Outlook 2013 contains the most significant improvements to the core Office 2013 applications.”

After you install and expand Yesware for Outlook, here’s what you’ll see:

Yesware for Outlook provides:

• Personal insights about your customer or prospect including location, social media presence, recent tweets, Klout score and much more.
• Company data about your prospects including company name, title, length of service, website, previous roles and more.
• Prospect features – You can easily turn your contact into a prospect so you’ll always know how this person fits into your goals.

Since this preview version of Outlook only allows add-ons to work as you are reading your email, we haven’t yet implemented Yesware features like tracking and templates, but fear not! They are on the way.

Ed Bott from ZD Net puts it well: “The biggest surprise is that Microsoft has taken its cloud services, desktop programs, and browser-based apps and fused them into a product that feels unified and natural. And they’ve pulled off this impressive accomplishment without altering the fundamental character of Office.”

The customer preview edition of Office is available here: office.com/preview

Please give Yesware for Outlook a try and let us know what you think!