Microsoft Office 2010: Outlook

Continuing our Microsoft Office 2010 exploration, we come to Microsoft Outlook 2010, the most used application during the day.  Some of the new features include:

• Conversation View
• Multiple Mailbox Support
• 64-bit Support
• Online Archive Folders
• Mail Tips
• Search Folders
• Enhanced Calendar Functionality

For users of Google Mail, Conversation View may seem like a feature long overdue. By allowing multiple emails to be combined into a thread, reading large quantities of emails can be done in a much quicker manner.

For enterprise users and consultants, the ability to connect to multiple distinct Exchange organizations may be the single greatest change to Outlook. Whereas clunky profiles used to be the only solution (or having Outlook Web App in addition to the regular client open), now any user who belongs to multiple organizations can easily add both into Outlook.

For power-users with multi-gigabyte email boxes, the twin benefits of 64-bit support (allowing greater memory usage) and Online Archives (allowing networked storage of archived messages, without pesky .pst files or performance hits) will make a huge difference in usability.

For those of us with smaller needs Mail Tips and Search Folders can speed up common tasks. Mail Tips are server side additions that will helpfully pop-up before one attempts to email a user who is out of the office, or if a user accidentally emails more than 25 people at once. These sorts of common sense precautions are sure to save people’s sanity. Enhanced Search Folders, by contrast, allow users to build up custom queries and drill down quickly to find relevant data without having to perform manual searches.

The best feature, I’ve saved for last. With Outlook 2010, the improvements in calendaring are large and powerful. Calendar groups can now be created to instantly see the status of groups of people who operate in a team. (Thus eliminating the need for complicated resource calendars that have multiple people on them.) In addition, the new “schedule” view allows a quick look at common tasks during the day. Day-by-day comparison also allows you to examine a pair of days (or even more!) that are non-contiguous for discrepancies.

Altogether, the changes in Outlook 2010 may be the strongest reason for an organization to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2010. Call New Signature for a demo of all the features, today!

If you are interested in learning more, check out the Microsoft Showcase: See What’s New in Microsoft Outlook 2010 video below.