Outlook 2007 Preview

Shared Folders
For organizations that use Exchange 2007 as their mail server, Outlook 2007 streamlines the process of sharing folders. Gaining access to a folder other than the default folders (e.g., Inbox, Calendar, Contacts) has always required several steps that aren’t obvious to the average user. For example, if you want to share such a folder in Outlook 2003 or an earlier version with a user I’ll call Erika, you need to grant Folder Visible permission to the top level of your mailbox and to all other folders higher in the hierarchy than the folder you want to share, plus grant the Reviewer role or other permissions on the folder you want to share. Then Erika must add your mailbox to the properties of her Exchange account. To share a folder in Outlook 2007, you simply right-click the folder, choose Share from the context menu, and send Erika the special message that Outlook generates. When the message arrives, Erika simply clicks the Open button in the message, and Outlook 2007 opens the folder and automatically adds it to her navigation pane.

If you share one of your default folders—your Calendar folder, for example—you can include a request for the recipient to share her folder in return, as you can see in Figure 3. (Figure 3 also shows the ribbon UI that replaces the menu and toolbars on individual Outlook items.) The recipient can choose Allow or Deny when the sharing request message arrives.

Improvements to Key Exchange Features
For your Calendar folder on an Exchange 2007 mailbox, you get more control over how much information Outlook exposes through the Free/Busy feature. As Figure 4 shows, you can choose exactly how much information to share about your appointments: no information at all, just your availability for different time periods, your free and busy times plus the subject and location of appointments, or the full details of your engagements. The new Scheduling Assistant works with the new availability Web service in Exchange 2007 suggest times for meetings according to when most invitees can attend and even tells you what rooms are available.

For years, users have asked for better Out of Office Assistant functionality, and Exchange 2007 delivers two frequently requested features in Outlook 2007. First, you can create two different out-of-office reply messages: one for people in your organization and another for outside contacts. Second, you can schedule in advance the times you want to send out-of-office notifications, as Figure 5 shows, and Outlook will automatically turn out-of-office messages on and off.

For Developers and All Users
On the development side, a greatly expanded programming model aims to eliminate the need to use additional programming libraries, such as Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) 1.21, and provides speedier access to Outlook items and properties. The new programming model also lets you create and modify Outlook message rules and automatic formatting rules in Outlook views. And add-in developers get a new form regions mechanism for adding to the Outlook custom form interface.

Finally, Outlook 2007 takes care of some of those little annoyances that have been bothering Outlook users, in some cases for years. The new version lets you view attached image files and Office document files right in the reading pane. Figure 6 shows an image preview with the navigation pane and To-Do Bar collapsed to leave more room for the image. You can overlay multiple calendars, which will appear in different colors so you can distinguish your schedule from that of your boss. When you add a contact that duplicates an existing contact, Outlook 2007 not only merges both sets of data, as earlier versions do, but also gives you a preview of the changes it will make, as you can see in Figure 7. Furthermore, whereas previous versions always discarded any new notes during a contact update, Outlook 2007 not only saves them but gives them a date/time stamp.