Take off and take your office with you: Part 1 |
| | Windows Mobile 6 represents another stride forward for people everywhere who need to be connected with their Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 information while on the go—whether that's heading to a meeting, sitting on an airplane, or stuck in traffic in the back of a taxicab. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American spends 100 hours each way commuting to work every year—that's a lot of "down time."
No matter where you are or what you're doing, if you have a phone with Windows Mobile 6 you can be productive and be connected with all the information you need. This article is designed to walk you through some of the new features available in Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile and explain how they can be used in real-world scenarios. |
| About synchronization | To get the most from your Windows Mobile phone, it's first important to understand a bit about synchronization—the process of getting your Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 data from your desktop or laptop PC onto your Windows Mobile phone. The standard way of doing this is to install Microsoft ActiveSync (if you're using Windows XP) or Windows Mobile Device Center (if you're using Windows Vista). When you connect your Windows Mobile phone to your computer with a USB cable, the synchronization process will start. Information will flow to and from Outlook, so if you've updated the phone number of a contact on your Windows Mobile phone during a business trip, Outlook on your desktop will be updated with that same information. Installing and configuring ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center is beyond the scope of this particular article, but there's a great "Getting Started" article about synchronization that covers it all. |
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Microsoft Outlook Mobile and Microsoft Exchange Server |
| If you happen to work in an organization that uses Microsoft Exchange Server, you're in for a real treat: Windows Mobile 6 is designed to work hand-in-hand with Exchange Server, offering a truly superb level of functionality. This article describes many of those features, but if you don't have access to an Exchange Server account, there's an interesting option you should consider—Microsoft Hosted Exchange. In the same way that you can purchase a Web hosting account from a company for your Web site, there are companies that offer access to all the features of Exchange Server 2007 for a small monthly fee, even if you're just a one-person business. As a small business owner myself, I didn't have the resources to deploy an Exchange Server, so Hosted Exchange was the perfect solution for me. It was the best decision I ever made regarding my e-mail. To find a Hosted Exchange provider, you can try your friendly neighborhood search engine or look through the Hosted Exchange Server Partner Directory. |
| Contacts | Contacts in Windows Mobile 6 mirrors the Contacts folder in Outlook 2007 for the PC—every contact, and every bit of information you have entered for that contact, is included. No matter how many contacts you have—20 or 2000—looking up a contact is a snap. Just start typing the name of the person or business you want to look up. This feature, called SmartDial, filters through your entire contact list and presents you a list of all your contacts that match. |
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 Figure 1: Contacts in Windows Mobile 6. |
If you type in only two letters, the list might be quite long, but as you keep typing the list will get dramatically shorter. In Figure 2, you can see the results when I enter the letters "C" and "O." It immediately filters down to two items. |
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 SmartDial filtering my contact list. |  Figure 3: Contact phone number. |
If you're using a phone with Windows Mobile 6 Professional that lacks a physical keyboard (such as the HTC Touch) you can use the on-screen keyboard to start typing what you're looking for. If you have a Windows Mobile phone with a keyboard, you can do this from the Home screen—there's no need to open up Contacts. I tend to prefer phones with physical keyboards for this very reason. With over 1500 contacts, it’s a great way for me to quickly find the person I want to call.
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| Once you find the contact you want, select it and you can then call any of the phone numbers, send an e-mail, or send a text message. |
| Tasks | Another part of the Outlook Mobile suite of tools is Tasks (Figure 4). Tasks are an important part of the Outlook experience, especially now that Outlook 2007 has added powerful new features for assigning categories to tasks and quickly flagging e-mail messages as tasks. I've personally found that I'm using tasks a great deal more now with Outlook 2007, especially after I created rules to notify me when I get a certain type of e-mail. The rule sets the e-mail as an active task, assigns it to a category, and it shows up in my To-Do bar—all completely automatically. Now that's productivity |
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 Figure 4: Tasks in Windows Mobile 6. |
Windows Mobile 5.0 doesn't have quite the same level of Tasks functionality, but the basics are there. Phones with Windows Mobile 6 Standard (non-touch screen) now have the ability to edit tasks, and Tasks supports categories at the basic level. Unfortunately, it doesn't display the category colors, but you can filter by categories (Figure 5). |
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 Figure 5: Filtering tasks based on category colors. |
With filtering you can take a long list of tasks and quickly get down to only the ones you want to see. It also supports the basic Tasks functionality in Outlook—start date, end date, priority, and reminders. Progress is limited to Completed or Not Completed; however, there's no support for the "% complete" field that Outlook 2007 has. |
| Notes | Outlook wouldn't be complete without Notes, so the same holds true for Outlook Mobile, with a few caveats. There's support for synchronized notes, but only for phones with Windows Mobile 6 Professional. |
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 Figure 6: Notes. |
If you have a phone with Windows Mobile 6 Standard, there's unfortunately no support for synchronized notes with the standard application. There is a great third-party program that will help called PhatNotes. It's a very rich application with all sorts of great features, but most importantly it synchronizes Outlook with your phone that has Windows Mobile 6 Standard.
Remember how I was praising the benefits of Exchange Server above? Well, this is one area where synchronizing locally with your PC is better—there's no support for synchronizing Outlook Notes wirelessly with Exchange ActiveSync, so you'll have to connect to your desktop computer in order to sync your notes. Thankfully, it's a fast process.
Notes are great for jotting down everything from a list of business tasks you want to accomplish, to scribbling notes about an idea you have and want to follow up on later. I personally use notes for scraps of information that I want to keep but aren’t worth putting into a standalone document: things such as lists of office supplies I need, step-by-step procedures for common tasks, and reference notes I’ve made from phone calls. |
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