Microsoft releases new Office Hub app for Windows 10 Creators Update to Insiders

Microsoft has quietly released a pretty major new feature coming with the Windows 10 Creators Update to Windows Insiders. The software giant today released the new Office Hub feature to Insiders as an update for the Get Office app on Windows 10 PCs. At the moment, the app shows up as “Get Office” — however, when you look at the task manager, you’ll see that it’s showing up as “Office Hub”.

This is what makes the app quite interesting as it is believed to be one of the major new features coming with the Creators Update. Microsoft’s internal plans suggest that the company could be integrating it right into Windows 10, allowing users to be able to access their Office documents right from the taskbar (as a Cortana-like UI) or the Action Center. In addition to this, the app is actually a Project Centennial app — meaning that it’s a Win32 app which users can download or update right from the Windows Store. As a result, Office Hub will have access to all the Win32 features which possibly aren’t available on the Universal Windows Platform.

At the moment, the Office Hub/Get Office app is pretty limited — it only shows your recent documents, lets you open some Office apps, get support, and that’s it. If Microsoft goes ahead with its plans, Office Hub could get integrated into a Cortana-like user-interface which users can access from the taskbar. For now, you can’t really do much with it. This will likely change over the coming months when Microsoft officially releases the new feature.

It’s worth noting that Office Hub is also expected to have mobile apps which will allow users to access all of their Office documents right from their smartphone, in addition to the desktop app.

Office Hub is just a part of Microsoft’s plans to improve productivity features on the Windows 10 with the Creators Update — the company already revealed new features such as MyPeople, and the update is also expected to bring a OneClip replacement to Windows 10 devices. The update is scheduled to arrive in early 2017, likely in March 2017.