Skype Releases New Toolbars For Office, Outlook Express, Thunderbird

Skype has released three new toolbars for Web, email, and desktop applications, which allow people to make VoIP calls from directly within from popular applications including Microsoft Outlook Express and Internet Explorer.

The three new toolbars are the Skype Toolbar for Microsoft Office, Skype Toolbar for Outlook Express and Skype Toolbar for Thunderbird, which is Mozilla's email client. Skype also announced upgrades to two existing toolbars for Web browsers, Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer, and Skype Toolbar for Firefo. In addition it announced an upgrade to the Skype Toolbar for Outlook.

The toolbars allow Skype users to call any phone number in a Microsoft Office document, email or Web page with a single click. The toolbars recognizes phone numbers and let a user to initiate calls, send instant messages and transfer files. The toolbars are all free and can be downloaded from skype.com.

The Skype toolbars are backwards compatible, and support all versions of Microsoft Office through Office 2000 (Outlook/Office 2000, XP and 2003), Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 (beta), as well as Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0 (beta).