Microsoft Offers A New Outlook On E-Mail

By Nancy Cox  Microsoft Corp. has promised to make sweeping changes to Outlook, its integrated e-mail and collaboration product, by midyear. And these plans are not a moment too soon: Outlook needs some serious improvements in performance and ease of use. While testing the Beta 1 code on Exchange Server 5.5 on an NT 4.0 SP3 Compaq Computer Corp. ProLiant 2500 server in Network Computing's central Florida lab, I caught a glimpse of these enhancements, and they are considerable. Obviously, Microsoft has been listening to the users in its focus groups and actually converting their desires into features and upgraded functionality. If your users like Outlook 97, you'll definitely want them to be the first on the block to have Outlook 98. Microsoft has discovered that users typically will install Outlook in one of three ways to meet their collaborative needs: as a POP3/IMAP4 client with an Internet connection, as a client of an Exchange Server, or without any e-mail capabilities (just using the calendar or contacts, for example). By selecting either of the first two options, Outlook recognized the existence of my current Exchange e-mail client and imported my mailbox. This feature is especially useful when migrating users from an older version of Outlook or Exchange or from Internet mail clients like QUALCOMM's Eudora. I noticed that Outlook's performance is significantly improved for both e-mail and calendars. Synchronization of offline folders is now performed in the background, so you don't have to get a cup of coffee while waiting. Outlook 98 also offers improved filtering for synchronizing both mail and calendar events. You can select particular items within a specific folder instead of having to do wnload the entire contents. I filtered contacts in Florida from my entire contacts file, which saved an enormous amount of download time. Because my calendar is now maintained locally, synchronization is much faster. Little Things Make All the Difference The ability to let you see at a glance the day's appointments, tasks and any unread messages is one of Outlook's little pleasures. The new Outlook Today feature cleverly condenses your working life into these three most frequently checked functions, so you can instantly rearrange your schedule or check your mail with just a click on the function's hyperlink. When looking up a person at the bottom of the screen, I was instantly taken into the contact management area, which now features a hyperlink to Microsoft's Expedia site. This let me quickly see a map pinpointing the contact's physical address. You can position Outlook Today on your desktop for viewing during the day and customize it with a corporate logo, department image or stock ticket, as w ell as links, GIFs and ActiveX controls. Outlook also lets you see an entire message at a glance. It includes a Preview Pane that let me see the complete contents of a selected message without actually having to open it up. This functionality extends the power of the three-line AutoPreview capability in the previous version and significantly reduces the time to interact with new mail. Other new ease-of-use features include significantly improved search and rule-making capabilities. Using a simple, Web-like search interface, I quickly pinpointed messages from a particular person or about a specific subject. Selecting a message and clicking on the Organize tool let me easily create a rule that files all future messages from this recipient to a folder, which can be created on the fly. This interface has been significantly improved over Outlook 97 and will let more users better manage their growing inboxes. Just as you can flag a message for a follow-up, you can now flag an Outlook 98 contact. The View b y Follow-Up Flag capability will then sort your contacts according to which ones require attention first. Reminders for contacts are triggered from these flags. Additional features consist of a five-day work week view in the calendar and the ability to print the day's calendar, including notes about each appointment. Outlook 98 also offers the ability to customize the second page of the contact forms, while an object browser and script debugger enhance the development environment. To personalize e-mail messages, Outlook provides multiple signatures that you can affix on a per-message basis. Outlook 98 supports HTML and MHTML (MIME HTML), so you can send and receive Web pages and other HTML documents within e-mail messages. In the lab, I successfully tested an HTML document embedded within a message. This is especially important with receiving messages, as some popular competitive mailers use HTML. Outlook 98 also provides WYSIWYG HTML editing, so it's easy to create HTML style content for messages. This software offers the ability to create personalized HTML stationery for your messages--colorful banners or logos, for example. Such features will continue to drive your messaging system's capacity limits. Other standards that Outlook 98 supports include vCard and vCalendar. With vCard, you can attach a snapshot of your business card to your Outlook contact information and to your messages. Users on other vCard-compliant systems can drag it into their contact area or address book. Mailing a contact to another user was quick and easy using the Insert Item feature in the new message. With vCalendar, you can send and receive meeting requests over the Internet to users of other vCalendar-compliant systems, and the content and format will be understood by that system. Outlook also now supports LDAP and S/MIME. Nancy Cox can be reached at ncox@nwc.com.

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