Tasks and Time Management in Outlook : News

New Outlook Team Blog

mmacbeth — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:46:00 GMT

The Outlook Team has just created a new blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook. Going forward, the Outlook Team blog will be the place to find out more about Outlook, beyond just tasks and time management in Outlook.

Below is a list of topics that you will see on the Outlook Team blog:

- Explanations of new features in Outlook 2007.

- Discussions of how people on the Outlook team use the product

- Tips and tricks from the Outlook product team

- Announcements about the betas

- Topical discussions

- Postings about technologies and products that are interesting in the communications space

Moving forward, I’ll be posting more on the Outlook Team blog – so look for my posts there! If there are time management related posts on the blog, I’ll will post links to the Team blog.

-Melissa

The Outlook Gadgets are here!!!

mmacbeth — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 12:27:00 GMT

I am excited to announce that the Outlook 2007 gadgets for the Windows Vista Sidebar have just been posted to the web! Check them out:

· Outlook Upcoming Appointments – shows you your upcoming appointments.

· Outlook Tasks – shows you your tasks and flagged mail all in one place, plus gives you an easy way to enter tasks, just like the To-Do Bar.

Now you can have all of the To-Do Bar goodness right alongside all of your other Vista gadgets.

Enjoy!

-Melissa

P.S. Since this was first posted, new versions of the gadgets have been put up on gallery.live.com (12/14/06)

Check 'em out!

Office 2007 has been Released To Manufacturing!

mmacbeth — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 06:06:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that on Friday, November 3 the 2007 Microsoft Office system was released to manufacturing.

You can read the official press release here.

Thank you to everyone that helped to make this great event happen!

YEAH OFFICE!

Olya's OneNote Blog

mmacbeth — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:31:00 GMT

For all you OneNote fans out there, Olya has just started her own OneNote Blog. Her blog will probably cover a myriad of topics, including task integration, and lots of tips and tricks; her first post is about enabling searching of OneNote content on SharePoint sites.

Beta 2 Technical Refresh is out!

mmacbeth — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 03:09:00 GMT

An update (technical refresh) for Beta 2 has been released. As this is an update, it needs to be installed over Beta 2. Files saved in the Beta 2 file format may not open once the update is installed, so save your documents in legacy formats before applying the update.

After installing, be sure to reset your To-Do Bar view and your task list views.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

Outlook Live users can get the latest connector at
http://g.msn.com/0CR1033/3.

Outlook 2007 Beta 2 Known issues

-Melissa

Office Live - what is it?

mmacbeth — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 03:22:00 GMT

As you might have guessed from my post on March 31 about dragging mail to the Date Navigator to make an appointment, I had a meeting on Friday morning to learn more about Office Live. I went into the presentation expecting to learn why it was important to have online wordprocessing of some such thing, but I was completely wrong - Office Live is the start of something really cool for small businesses.

Turns out that Office Live is all about giving small business an online presence - for free - and providing extra tools for a nominal fee (approximately $29.95 a month.) After talking to small business owners at the NAPO conference, I think OfficeLive will be great for them, especially as they use it with the next version of Office ;-).

There are three levels of Office Live - Office Live Basics, Office Live Collaboration, and Office Live Essentials. Office Live Basics is free and includes a website with a domain that the customer owns (not Microsoft), and 5 free e-mail accounts with their domain, each with 2GBs of storage. It also includes an online tool to build the website and online web traffic monitoring so that customers can monitor how many people visit their site. Here is just a tidbit that might get some of you interested in Office Live Basics:

Use your calendar to interact with others: You can schedule and invite people to meetings, or even share your calendar with anyone who has a Microsoft Passport account.

Office Live Collaboration and Office Live Essentials each include more business related tools. The Collaboration package includes shared calendaring, to-do lists (oh my!), employee management tools, project management tools, contact management tools, etc. (There is a lot there.) The big deal with Office Live Collaboration is the ability to created shared sites - an intranet for your small business. One of the cool features is that you can create an internal site for a project, and then share that site with your customers. Office Live Essentials combines aspects of Office Live Basics and Office Live Collaboration. For a full comparison, click here.

In any case, I thought it was pretty cool. For more, check out their blog: http://spaces.msn.com/officeliveblog/blog/

NAPO

mmacbeth — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:17:00 GMT

Two weeks ago, I attended the 18th Annual National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO)conference in Boston, MA.

A little about NAPO:

“The National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) is the premier national association dedicated to the field of organizing.

Formed in 1985 as a not-for-profit professional association, NAPO is dedicated to sharing information about the growing organizing industry, its trends, and its concerns. NAPO works to set and define quality standards for the organizing profession. NAPO's members include organizing consultants, speakers, trainers, authors, and manufacturers of organizing products. NAPO is The Organizing Authority.” – www.napo.net

The conference was dedicated to giving professional organizers the tools they need both to run their businesses and to help their clients. To this end, the conference had a wide range of exhibits and sessions, ranging from a booth by Rubbermaid demonstrating the latest storage containers, to sessions on how to organize for the grieving client, to blogging, to e-mail management. Electronic management was clearly one of the hot topics at the conference: KJ McCorry’s presentation on e-mail management had over a hundred people in attendance and was standing room only.

At the conference, Jessica Arnold and I showed off some of the new features in Outlook 2007. Naturally, I highlighted the task and time management features. Not surprisingly, many of the people at the conference had read Sally McGhee’s Take Back Your Life! and/or David Allen’s Getting Things Done and were very interested to see the changes that we had made since Outlook 2003. The excitement about the next release was palpable (“when can I buy it?” was the most frequently asked question) and it was fantastic talking to customers. As most professional organizers are in business for themselves, it was interesting to hear what features they are most excited about from a small business perspective - such as contact management and Calendar sharing without an Exchange Server. Overall, the time management features (flagging, the To-Do Bar, and Tasks on the Calendar) were well liked, as were Color Categories, Electronic Business Cards, Search, Attachment Previewing, and Sending Calendars via e-mail.

The professional organizers I met were fantastic and I wish them all the best in their endeavors.

Beta1 Technical Refresh is Out!

mmacbeth — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:19:00 GMT

Now that Beta1 Technical Refresh (B1TR) has been released, so are many of the new pretty visuals. I thought I would post a few pictures of the new look with some comments of things of note. At first glance, you’ll notice that Outlook and the rest of Office are now more blue than gray. For more on the overall look of Office, see Jensen Harris’ blog post on A New Look for Office.

If you have installed B1TR and have used the Beta1 build, please reset your To-Do Bar.

Some highlights:

· The Date Navigator now has fewer borders

· New Item Row is now part of the task list.

· Category swatches are smaller and more rounded

· The flags are bigger and now change based on due date – the sooner the due date, the brighter the flag. (Look at the flags in the Daily Task List for comparison.)

· The X is less prominent and the minimize button is now on the right.

· You can now change the To-Do Bar settings (On/Minimized Off/Customize..) by right clicking on the To-Do Bar header or clicking on any blank space in the To-Do Bar or going to Tools->Options->Other… ->To-Do Bar options.

· The To-Do Bar is now off by default in the Calendar – but it persists per module, so you can have it on in Mail, but off everywhere else if you want, or vice versa.

· Many of the rendering problems in the Daily Task List have been fixed.

· The Daily Task List has been “prettied up” and it now has a button to minimize it.

The To-Do Bar

The Daily Task List

Beta Testers: Please Reset Your To-Do Bar

mmacbeth — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 01:02:00 GMT

A similar message has already been posted to the newsgroups, and appears in the readme for Beta1 Technical Refresh (which is out now!), but I thought I would post it again here.

To have the best beta experience with the Outlook Beta 1 Technical Refresh, please reset your To-Do Bar task list view. Please do the following:

1. Click on the "Arrange by:" header in the To-Do Bar.
2. Select "Custom..."
3. In the dialog, click on "Reset Current View" in the lower left corner.

You will now have the "new look" of the task list, including the "new item" row, and the flagging column (if it was missing.)

Why do beta testers have to do this?

Outlook "preserves" views between upgrades, which is good in the majority of cases - except when Outlook changes the default view between interim versions as has happened to the To-Do Bar. This issue won't affect non-TAP/Beta customers who have never used a build before Beta1TR. In other words, this issue won't effect you if you upgrade from Outlook 2003 to the released version of Outlook 2007 when it comes out. Of course, beta testers don't have to update their To-Do Bars, but that could lead to erroneous bug reports and misperceptions of functionality, when in fact the view just needs to be updated. If the To-Do Bar task list view is not reset, the To-Do Bar may be missing the Task Input Panel (aka "new item" row), the flag column, and the default view - without which could lead to a very sad beta testing experience.

Thanks for resetting your view!

-Melissa