The Beta Undercover Reporter explores Outlook 2007
Personal organisers are one of the hardest category of software to get right. This is partly because of the diverse types of data that they have to deal with, and the complex relationships between them; and partly because they are so personal. We each arrange our lives differently and need our data presented in diverse ways that give us meaningful snapshots of what is important at any given moment. Microsoft Office Outlook already does a pretty good job as a personal organiser. However Outlook 2007 introduces a number of features that transform the product and could in themselves justify the upgrade to the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
Organising your day
Many of these centre around the new To-Do Bar that appears down the right-hand edge of the screen. This splits into three sections, any of which can be switched off. At the top is the calendar, which can display up to nine months ahead. Below this is the Appointments section, which can list up to 25 of your future appointments (the default is a more useful three).
Below this is the most important section, namely the Task List, which displays not only tasks but also flagged mailed items. These can be ordered in a number of ways, however the most useful is Group by Due Date, as you are then presented with a list of those items that need to be dealt with today, tomorrow, this week, next week, this month, next month or ‘later’.
This works particularly well thanks to the new flags that you can apply to your mail items. In Outlook 2003 you can apply a flag chosen from a limited range of six colours, and set a date for when the item needs dealing with. In Outlook 2007, all flags are red but the shade indicates its urgency, ranging from bright red for items that must be dealt with today to pale pink for items that can be dealt with later.
Furthermore you can create and assign any number of named categories to any Outlook item, be it an appointment, a mail message, a task or a contact, and assign any one of 25 colours to each category. You could, for example, assign all the items associated with a particular project to a light pink category called ‘Project A’, or all the items associated with your forthcoming holiday to a bright blue category labelled ‘Holiday’. Notes can be assigned to the same categories, and you can even arrange for messages or appointments which satisfy certain rules to be automatically assigned to a particular category.
Another nice feature is the Daily Task List that appears at the bottom of the Day and Week calendar view. Like the To Do Bar this displays both tasks and flagged mail items by due date or start date. You can then assign time to work on such items simply by dragging them from the Daily Task List onto the calendar.The overall effect is to integrate Tasks in a much more useful fashion with your appointments and mail items, while the use of colour makes it much easier to visualise what is going on and organise your time.
Working together
Outlook has long provided facilities for working together through shared folders, the ability to assign tasks, to invite attendees to meetings, and so forth. Outlook 2007 makes much of this easier. For example, you can display multiple calendars side by side, and use the ‘overlay’ feature to combine them into a single display to help you find free time for a meeting.
Like the other applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Outlook 2007 offers far greater integration with Windows SharePoint Services, making it much easier for teams to work together in an efficient and flexible manner. You can have lists from Windows SharePoint appear within Outlook 2007 as new folders in your mailbox that are kept fully synchronised with their source. SharePoint tasks show up in your To Do Bar, and you can work with SharePoint calendars in exactly the same way as you can with shared calendars. You can also have tasks from Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 show up in Outlook 2007.
Another nice feature is the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds from within Outlook 2007. The subscription process is extremely easy, and once you have subscribed the feeds appear as new folders in your mailbox.
Microsoft Office Professional and Small Business Edition 2007 also include Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager which gives you a more comprehensive contact and customer management application for tracking accounts, working with customers and following leads. We don’t have room to go into much detail here, but as you can see from the screenshot above, Business Contact Manager expands Outlook 2007 to give you a complete ‘information dashboard’.
These are only a few of the new features on offer from Outlook 2007. We haven’t mentioned the considerable improvements to the search facility, or the ability to preview attachments without leaving Outlook. It is good to see that the Beta 2 works with Microsoft ActiveSync 4.1 and above, making it easy to share your data across your Windows Mobile devices, and that you can now assign time zones to appointments. Certainly, this new version provides plenty of reasons to upgrade. Why not download the Beta 2 of the 2007 release now?
