Microsoft Outlook 2007
O.K. I've been cleared to talk about the next version of Outlook now so here's a brief report -- I'll update this as questions arise.
Interface
One of the first things you'll notice about the new Outlook is some differences in the interface. The navigation pane on the left is largely the same as Outlook 2003 but now you can click the double-arrow to quickly minimize it and tuck it out of your way. The other big new thing is the To Do Bar -- on the right side of the screen a quick view of your calendar and, most importantly, a task list that shows you immediate To-Do items which includes E-mails that you have flagged (see the next item).Mail to Do
Clicking the follow-up flags now lets you essentially make to-do items out of your mail items and it adds them to your To-Do Bar. This makes it much easier to organize your workflow and keep up with work that needs to be done. Essentially when you right-click the follow-up flag you specify the time-line: i.e. it's due Today, Tomorrow, This Week, etc. Or you can specify a custom date. That becomes the Due Date which controls how the e-mail item is displayed on the To-Do Bar.Calendar
The Calendar gets a new look too with tasks due on a particular day being listed in a box at the bottom of the Calendar page as if part of that day. It's hard to describe but it makes sense when you see it. You can also overlay two calendars upon each other to make it easier to sync them up and find conflicts and available times.RSS
Microsoft Outlook 2007 includes integrated RSS capability -- you can now subscribe to RSS Feeds and have the articles downloaded, automatically, into folders just as if they were e-mail messages. Since they download into folders they are fully searchable AND means you can aggregate them along with e-mail content using Search Folders.Bye Bye Outlook Editor
The Word editor is now the only editor and it's been nicely enhanced for Outlook. You don't need to have Word to use the editor because it comes as a special DLL file with Outlook. The speed is nice and the capabilities are rich.Power Search
The indexing power of MSN Desktop Search is built-into Outlook now. It constantly indexes in the background meaning that searching, even across multiple folders, is much faster and more powerful than before. It even does type-ahead searching where you can start typing in the field and you can watch the results-set narrow as you type.What's NOT in the New Version? (at least the current build)
- NNTP Support - We go thru this one every version. Outlook Express is still, at least for now, the Microsoft solution for reading and posting in NNTP. There isn't any NNTP support build into Outlook.
- Tasks ON the calendar. We get very close with the Tasks improvements but they still aren't actually ON the calendar. Frankly I think I like it fine the way Outlook 2007 does it.
- Notes replaced by OneNote. The classic Outlook Notes are virtually unchanged from previous versions.