Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog

This is a great news. Knowing the future of my favourite Office program directly from the product team is exciting. Thanks guys!

Nice job Michael. Looks pretty cool. Can't wait to start reading your teams posts.

-Blog Queen (aka Janac)

Good to see you've got a team blog now.

Does this mean I can unsubscribe from all your individual blogs? ;-)

Glad to see this pop up. I'm looking forward to reading.

Nice to see a blog about the only Office Program i use daily :)

Hi,

What are you doing to progress and stop "top-posting" within Outlook?

Often people, who know how to quote correctly, are forced by their employer to use Outlook.  Until now, they are able to use 'Outlook Quote Fix'  - http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/

Unfortunately, it is not yet compatible with O27k.  What plans do you have to integrate correct, RFC designated, quoting within your product?

Secondly, have you been able to implement IMAP-IDLE support yet?

Regards,

Chris Buckley.

Systems Administrator, GNU/Linux.

Hi! hope I can get an answer now about why categories are stripped on internal mail (using Exchange). Welcome!

Great! I can't wait to see your blogs.

Cool... I will look forward to this blog. I hope you will be open to honest and critical feedback. I've never been a fan of Outlook. I would like to be but Outlook has never been (in my opinion) as functional or easy to use as I would like. In particular, the email part of the program I find disappointing (I use Thunderbird). I have just installed the latest version of Outlook and will give it another try.

Nice to see this Team Blog!

I am hoping that one can see the posts regularly.

Hi guys, congratulations on the blog and thanks for doing it. I am one of your most avid users and developers and I'm currently working on a product that is going to make Outlook development much more developer-friendly.

I know that because of the COM/STA nature of Outlook it's a difficult challenge but I think the most important thing you should consider for Outlook 14 is improving the threading situation. Using the Outlook API or heck, even just using Outlook is dreadfully slow and doesn't scale well with multi-core processors.

It might just be time to consider breaking compatibility and developing a new API.

At any rate, keep up the good work and I'll be checking in from time to time.

Nice to see this blog. Keep it up and blog very much.

I have a shared inbox account because I do all my bosses email.  I installed Office 2007 and now I can't see my bosses inbox, outbox, sent items but I can see the contacts and calendar.  Has anybody run into this problem?

Folks, what should happen if someone does not use the Office suite and wants to sync his WM5 device with the desktop? He/she should use Outlook, right?

Outlook comes with the WM5 devices, but can also be bought as a standalone product. Because Outlook 2007 rocks, I bought it standalone.

Then I wanted to use other Office applications on my home PCs and, because of that I bought Office Home & Student. I only need Calendar, Contacts and Mail in one PC. The other ones I use for reviewing information and doing school work. I then thought OLK2k7 + O2k7 Home & Student was the perfect composition to my needs.

Well, it seems like Outlook Standalone 2007 and Office 2007 Home & Syudent do not go well together. I found no information preventing me from doing that before I bought OLK2k7 standalone.

Would you guys tell me why I am so wrong in assuming they should go well together?

Kudos, anyway, for the great work you guys do

WOOT this is fantastic. Could I suggest that the first topic for discussion be com addins in outlook and what best practice is out there to help customers with lots of custom com addins.

Cheers

rohan

Awesome!  Can you guys fix the speed issues and make desktop actually search my large PST file on vista?

Well, one could say it is about time. But instead we’ll just say, we’re glad this happened

Here are a couple of things that I thought would get fixed in Outlook 2007, but sadly they didn't, so I hope they could be incorportated through a future Service Pack or by indivudual hot-fixes:

1. Whenever I enter a contact's Birthday, it automatically appears in the Calendar, which is nice. However, it doesn't display the contact's age. Of course, each year should display the right age.

For example, if I have a contact named John Doe, who was born on June 30, 1980, then in year 2006 it should display "John Doe's 26th Birthday", and in year 2007 it should display "John Doe's 27th Birthday" and so on.

2. There should be a seperation between Contacts' Emails and Faxes. Whenever I need to include several contacts in a new email message, and I click on the "To" button, I get to see both Emails & Faxes. There should be options for the user to "display Emails only", "Display Faxes Only" or "Display Emails & Faxes".

Hope you guys incorporate these changes soon,

Thanks.

excellent! Subscribed!

I subscribed too.

Here's a feature-request I really would love to see in upcoming versions of Outlook:

Make it possible to sync with a variety of sources. For instance: I got an Exchange Server here, but actually I do not need it because everything I need is in pieces out in the cloud. Google Calender Sync e.g. would be great

Great to see you here.

I had been a happy user of Outlook for years but was sadly forced to switch to Barca 2.5 by Poco Systems. It starts up and checks my mail accounts withing seconds and has a superfast search engine without forcing you to run the cpu\disk expensive microsoft desktop search to do it.  Unfortunately, office 2007 is currently utterly frustrating in these regards.  Even with the latest fixes, it takes up to a full minute to get up-to-speed and check my mail at startup! Without installing MDSearch, searching through my years of email seems to take centuries and worse still it starts from the oldest to the newest which is rarely, if ever, preferred. Please win me back to Outlook guys with some savvy fixes!

welcome :) I subscribe this blog

I would be happy with Outlook, if it could handle large storage of email data. Contrary to Jessica Arnold's notion that users should not use OL as a file dump, these days, in some business sectors, email needs to be stored for many years, because it is a written record of client communication. In the two law firms I've worked at in the last 10 years, it is common for every important email to be printed out, and stored in hardcopy in a file. Ideally, we would just keep it stored in electronic format, but Outlook can't handle anything practically over a 2GB pst file. Sure, it is advertised as being capable of more, but the reality is different from the promise.

I don't need more fancy features. What's there is fine. I just need OL to be capable of storing and handling large volumes of email, upwards of 10GB or 20GB.

It no longer is a simplistic option to ask people to delete emails from their inbox to keep it small. In our business, we need to keep records of written correspondence, which, these days, is happening more and more by email.

One way to help both users and the MS marketing effort is to talk about the possible synergies of using Outlook and OneNote.  A prior comment states that Outlook is the only Office app that the writer uses every day; some would say that about OneNote.  Unfortunately, neither MS nor the other after-market how-to book publishers have given OneNote any significant attention.

We are unfortunatly a Lotus Domino shop (Cough cough, embarasment) with that said we use Outlook with the MS Connector. Are there plans to provide a new connector for Domino with Outlook 2007. This is what is keeping us from moving to Office 2007 at this time.

Thanks

Nothing wrong with using Notes.  Plenty of positive features in Notes Mail, and more to come in the next release!

We have just completed the switch from Lotus Notes to Outlook 2003.  Release timing for 2007 sucked for our migration.  So, I hope that this blog will also cater to the Outlook 2003 users!

I find it funny that the RSS feed for this site doesn't work in my O2K7...

Can anyone explain why the Outlook 2007 post form message body is read only on existing items? Edit message is gone and revised contents deletes the original and creates a new item.

All the other forms allow for the message body to be edited: note, journal, appt, task etc...

Is this a bug, oversite or requested feature?

Thanks

Glad to see this blog up. I hope it will also be useful for Outlook 2k3 users.

Outlook 2003 Calendar Sync issue.

I have been using Outlook 2003 with all updates. When sync to Treo 700W, calendar data prior to mid June is gone on Treo but still present on PC. Calendar data after mid June updates okay.

System is Windows XP Pro with Microsoft ActiveSync V4.5, Treo 700W with Microsoft Mobile Windows V5.0

This has been working in the past and wondering if some Microsoft auto update has caused this problem.

The Tracking Tab does not appear sent e-mails using Outlook 2003 in Vista.  How doe I turn this feature on?

Cheers

Jimbo

Hi:

My company will be migrating from Groupwise to Exchange 2007 early next year.  Our curretn Office version is 2002 and I am trying to convince the business that at the very least we should ensure that all of the clients are using Outlook 2003.

Does anyone know of documented differences between the Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003 and Outlook XP when connecting to Exchange 2007.

Thanks

One thing that Notes has always had but has never been avaialble in Outlook is the ability to prompt for where to file an outgoing email message or NOT file it. In outlook you have to go into Options every time you want to change whether it should be filed, or what folder you want it in.  So the Sent Mail becomes a HUGE folder with mail relating to many different folders in it.  

You might try using rules to automatically file your sent mail. While not a perfect solution, it might help.

Thanks for the suggestion.

-Melissa

Outlook PM

Nice to join in this blog. I need ur help in doing a task in Outlook...  I need to have a command button inside the Outlook editor, whose click event in macro is coded. So tat when i send mail to some one, then will click the button and the corresponding macro code should get executed. Let me know how to add a button in the outlook editor...

Awaiting for ur replies...

Thanks

Anbu

I am looking for a way in Outlook 2003/2007 to automatically delete items in the Junk Email folder. We have a SPAM filter at a server that automatically places items into the Junk Folder that we suspect as SPAM mail. Some people would like to review for legitimate emails and others want to automatically delete anything placed in this folder without reviewing. Is there a way to automatically empty this folder as items arrive?

          I sadly purchased Office 2007 Student Edition without noticing that it was missing the important feature of Outlook!  

 Is there any way to simply get Outlook for this suite as an add-on?

         Unfortunately I bought it at Best Buy which like most companies, will not take back or even exchange software, since they assume that the person has copied the software.  

However I say that you should get off of business if you're going to operate on the assumption that all of your customers are evil and out to get you!

I will have to get the full Outlook I suppose. Let this be a warning to check exactly what is included in the software on the box before hurrying to the checkout!

I must rant about Outlook 2007.  I have attempted to export my calendar and contacts.  When I export the contacts to a CSV file the calendar events are saved, but abbreviated...only the Categories, Priority, Private, Sensitivey are saved.  When I save the incoming or sent email to a CSV file the record headers are saved, without the body of the text.  Saving Notes saves only the title, color, priority, and sensitivity.  

I have removed and reinstalled Outlook twice and run the repair process twice with the same results.  I even found a Microsoft employee, showed him the steps I have taken, and he had the same results on my machine.  After talking to his MS Buds, he said to reinstall.  :-(

Bellsouth (now AT&T)prevents outgoing mail from being sent if not connected to a Bellsouth/AT&T network.  The argument being that spammers can generate email through Outlook when not on a monitored network; so they have designed the interface to disallow outgoing mail.  To ease their concern (other ISPs as well?) could there be a challenge for the user to enter a pin or some other data when emailing multiple recipients?  

How do you configure Outlook MSP to not display the welcome message requiring a response about online updates when Outlook starts the first time?

Glad I found this blog.

Why are categories not transferred to a PDA for notes in O2007? Major disappointment for me.

Hello, I am looking for an answer to a question I received working on the help desk and can't seem to find it easily.

In Outlook 2007, If a client's mailbox is full, what happens to incoming new mail? I know the client will receive an e-mail that the mailbox is full, but do the incoming messages stay on the server and are they automatically delivered when the client cleans up their inbox? Do the messages stay for a certain amount of time (i.e. 30 days) or do they stay indefinitely until the client takes action?

Thanks for any help anyone can give!

I just switched from XP Home to XP Pro and experienced numerous problems.  It seemed like everything was okay, but now my Outlook 2003 doesn't synch with my internet provider (cox).  When I try to receive my emails on Outlook, it kind of bogs down.  The error comment says that the connection to the server was interupted.  It appears that I can send emails but can't receive them.