Microsoft Outlook: Features and Functionality

Getting the Most from Outlook
Let's take a closer look at some of the features that distinguish Outlook from its earlier incarnations. In the process I'll identify some easy things you can do to improve and personalize its performance.

Streamlining with folders. You can use folders in Outlook to store anything from mail messages to Word and Excel documents to full Web pages. The primary folder you use in Outlook is the Universal Inbox, which functions as the name promises: It's the one place you receive all your messages—email, voice mail, fax, or multimedia. Currently, more than 100 Exchange Server add-on applications are available that let you convert voice mail to text and text to voice mail; direct your faxes to your Inbox instead of the common area fax machine; and dial in to the office, pick up your voice-mail messages on email, and listen to them on your PC. You'll even find applications that let you send the first few hundred characters of a voice or mail message to your pager.

The Universal Inbox narrows the number of places you need to check for your messages to one, but the trade-off is Inbox information overload. Here is where the Outlook folder concept is a lifesaver. It can help you organize your work in any way you desire.

To present folders, Outlook uses a device called the Outlook bar (as shown in Screen 1, page 202), which houses shortcuts to folders that can be anywhere in Outlook on the hard disk. The Outlook bar takes up a portion of the left side of the application's window and contains three sliding panes: one for mail, one for Outlook's primary folders, and one for your folders. You can add bars (or groups, in Outlook terminology) as you see fit, and you can change their names. (Unfortunately, the Outlook bar is another file that must follow users as they move from PC to PC, which is a significant challenge to enterprise deployments. The profilename.sav file stores Outlook bar settings in this situation.)

Outlook begins with a few folders on each bar, but you can place any number of folders, in any order, on the bar, including folders on your hard disk that you want to access from Outlook. With this feature you can access selected files in Outlook without having to launch Windows Explorer to get to them.

You can do most things in Outlook that you do in Windows Explorer, but differences in the way you must perform certain actions take getting used to. For example, the file hierarchy is available in Outlook or Network Neighborhood, but you must switch to the Other group on the Outlook bar or click My Computer from the Go menu to see the file hierarchy. Although you can add anything from Explorer as a folder to the Outlook bar, this capability is less functional than being able to navigate up and down the hierarchy. To add a file from Explorer to the Outlook bar, you must display the folder list after you have switched to the Other bar. Having to add each folder individually to the Outlook bar can help, but it hobbles file-system access. Overall, however, Outlook is a major leap forward in connecting files, mail, and scheduling functions in one easy-to-use application.

The Outlook bar takes up valuable screen real estate that you often need when you're performing multiple tasks on the screen. Fortunately, the bar is easy to remove. To do so, from the View menu, select the Outlook Bar command, or press Alt+V, and then press O, to toggle the Outlook bar off and on. You can still navigate to other folders through the other menus, although you will have access to the file system folders only when the Outlook bar is up.

A nice feature would be the ability to store documents in Outlook in the same folders that house mail relating to the document, and to drag the file over from the Desktop when you complete it. It's cumbersome to have to take extra steps to open Explorer to put a document away when you're finished with it. One solution is to add a Desktop folder to the Outlook bar. Then, dragging the document to any folder inside Outlook is no problem.

Ruling over Inbox overload. Rules became familiar to Microsoft customers with the advent of Exchange Server 4.0, but other vendors have offered rules for some time. In Outlook, a rule lets a user specify conditions and actions so that when messages arrive, the software automatically performs prescribed actions on messages that meet defined conditions. For example, say you receive messages from an Internet mailing list that floods your Inbox with 100 messages a day. You might lose important messages in and among the list messages because all the messages land in the Inbox. By using rules, you can specify a way for Outlook to recognize certain messages from a given mailing list (maybe the sender address or a signature or some text in the message body) and move those messages to another folder, which you also specify. Then, as long as you set the conditions properly, Outlook will move all targeted messages out of the Inbox when they arrive and leave only your critical mail. The key to using rules is in administration, both for the LAN administrator, who must build extra processing power into the Exchange Server to support background processing of rules, and for the user, who needs adequate training to use rules effectively.

The Rules Wizard is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/outlook/optimize. Once it's set up, the wizard installs itself in the Tools menu under Rules Wizard. It will let you create and edit rules to manage messages without connecting to an Exchange Server to have them processed. Be aware that this tool is an unsupported add-on, and although the natural-language processing simplifies rule definitions, it adds to the confusion when you need to troubleshoot why the rules aren't working. By adding an extra layer of friendliness between you and your criterion, the natural language that defines the rule also tends to disguise what the rule is looking for.

Sharing information easily with groupware functions. Outlook includes several groupware features that ease continued communication between teams. Tracking functions automatically keep track of messages and how they flow through organizations. Read and Delivery are functions that deliver a receipt or response to senders that their messages have arrived or been opened. Message Recall lets an Exchange Server user who is running the Outlook client recall a message if the recipient has not opened it.

Microsoft has added an option to Outlook when it is connected to an Exchange Server: Voting buttons automatically track and tabulate polling responses. This option lets the polling user select from an array of response buttons (Yes, No, Maybe, Approve, Reject) in composing a poll. The polling user clicks the Options tab on the New Message window to view a list of available buttons and select those desired. Recipients receive the poll questions with the appropriate response buttons attached and instructions for answering. Voting is easy, and Outlook keeps track of votes and summarizes them for the poll taker on the Tracking tab of the original message.

Fixing it on the fly with IntelliSense. Outlook contains many of the IntelliSense features familiar from other Office applications. One of the most useful is the Auto Preview feature on the Inbox. It lets a user see the first three lines of incoming messages without having to open them, allowing for quick mail sorting.

The Auto Date feature converts a text description of a date into a calendar date (for instance, "The second Tuesday of April" becomes April 14, 1998). Auto Name Check checks email addresses against the Address Book and underlines ambiguous names with the familiar red squiggly line, signaling that a manual correction is necessary. The user then right-clicks the name to see a display of logged entries that are similar to the one in question and can either verify the name or add it to the Address Book.

3, 2, 1—Contacts. Outlook incorporates a new contact manager, called Contacts, that combines the Schedule+, Exchange, and Word mail merge databases into one contact manager. Contacts is a well thought-out database with fields for everything you might want to track and places for more phone numbers than one person could ever collect, including telex, radiophone, and assistant and callback numbers.

Contacts usually does what it is supposed to do­keep track of your contact data. The only problems that users repeatedly report occur when users try to get something in or out of the database without typing the entry. One common example is when a user imports phone and address information from an Excel spreadsheet. The import wizard is generally friendly but requires that you manually map the field to the new location every time you import into it. If your formatting within Excel does not completely mirror your data, the data might not be imported or it might arrive distorted.

Group Scheduling saves wasted time on the phone. Group Scheduling has been fixed in Outlook. Interoperability has been improved with Schedule+ 1.0 and Schedule+ 95, so users can share schedules during the transition to Outlook as long as they're aware of a few caveats. Microsoft says you can continue to share schedules seamlessly if you follow a few suggestions: First, attempt to migrate all users of the workgroup at the same time, and upgrade conference rooms and resource accounts after you've migrated users. Second, make sure users keep their Schedule+ files until after they have imported them successfully into Outlook. Last, be sure to activate the Outlook option for continuing to use Schedule+ 95 as the primary schedule until the transition is complete (this option is a checkbox in the Outlook Tools\Options\Calendar menu).

A good rule of thumb is that all users must run the same version of the schedule in order for full-function scheduling and resource sharing to take place. Because Outlook is the most up-to-date product, it can communicate with all versions of Schedule+. But users who run a version of Schedule+ can communicate with only the same or an earlier Schedule+ program. Choose the earliest Schedule+ program your users run as the standard to get you through the transition, and save Outlook to communicate backward until all users get it on their desktops.

Microsoft says it has "an extremely simple client licensing model. Users purchasing Microsoft Exchange Server receive all the Microsoft clients free of charge with the purchase of the server product. In addition, the client-access license price is the same, regardless of the client that the users employ to access Microsoft Exchange Server." What this statement means is that as long as users are licensed on the Exchange Server, they can get mail using the Exchange client, Outlook client, or Web Access without paying for each type of client. Everyone still has to buy a client-access license, but at least not one for each client.

Outlook for the Future
Outlook provides tremendous functionality in one package. Even in Outlook's earlier versions, and considering the product's weak points, Microsoft has delivered a personal information manager worth migrating to, and a platform for continued innovation and consistency in the future. Although users may need time to grab hold of Outlook's advanced ideas, users will become more able to solve any problems they encounter as they become more sophisticated in using the program. In any case, we'll all have plenty of time to get comfortable with the program, because it looks like Outlook is here to stay.