Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog

Outlook .pst file format and interoperability

2009-10-29T17:45:00Z

This week, the Outlook product team hosted a .pst file format interoperability event here on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. As we announced on the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog, our team plans to release a specification of the .pst file format to the public. This week’s interoperability event is part of a series of steps that we are taking to gather feedback from industry partners and experts on preliminary drafts of the specification. If you are not familiar with the underpinnings of Outlook, .pst files are one type of data file that Outlook uses to save user data such as e-mail messages, contacts, and appointments.

During the interoperability event, we presented a preliminary specification of the .pst file format to selected industry experts in areas such as antimalware, electronic records management, data archiving, data recovery, and data migration. We collected useful feedback about our documentation roadmap, and the attendees were supportive of the direction and approach we are taking.

We understand our plan to document the .pst file format might cause some of our customers and partners to wonder about our commitment to MAPI (Messaging API) and the Outlook Object Model as interoperability mechanisms of Outlook. To us, the .pst file format specification doesn’t change the role of MAPI and the Outlook Object Model. While we are pleased to provide another mechanism to access data stored in .pst files, we continue to support MAPI and the Outlook Object Model as key elements of Outlook interoperability and extensibility. We do expect that the release of the .pst file format specification will open up new usage scenarios that were previously difficult to accomplish, especially in multi-platform and server scenarios where MAPI and the Outlook Object Model are not available.

Since we announced our plan to release the .pst file specification, we have received requests from people who want to participate in the review of early drafts of the specification. If you are interested in actively participating in the review of preliminary drafts of the .pst file format specification, send an email message to pstinfo@microsoft.com and then we will contact you when a preliminary draft of the specification is ready for broader review. If you only are seeking the final version, we anticipate releasing the .pst file format specification in the first half of 2010 under our Open Specification Promise.

Daniel Ko
Outlook Development Manager

Unified Messaging Improvements

2009-10-27T23:00:00Z

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 delivered the first version of our Unified Messaging (UM) experience from the Microsoft Exchange and Outlook teams. UM enables you to receive voice mails and FAXs in your Outlook Inbox. You can listen to voice mail messages while in Outlook or on your phone.

In Outlook 2010, we’ve added some cool new features to Unified Messaging, including Voice Mail Preview, protected voice mail, and Call Answering Rules to make the UM experience even more compelling. All of the features described below require an account on an Exchange 2010 server, and work with both Outlook Web App and Outlook 2010. There is also more to Unified Messaging with Exchange 2010 than I’ve mentioned below, so look for more information about the complete set of new Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging features.

Voice Mail Preview: Using Microsoft Speech technology, every time you receive a new voice mail message, the Exchange Unified Messaging server creates a transcript of the voice message and adds it to the voice mail message in your Inbox. With Voice Mail Preview, you can read what the caller said without playing the voice mail message. This is especially useful when you are somewhere that you can’t listen to the audio (like reading your messages during a meeting).

The preview text is not always 100% accurate due to the limitations of automated speech recognition technology. To accommodate for this, you can easily click a word in the preview text and the voice mail audio around that word is played. This lets you jump around in the audio to only the words that seem incorrectly transcribed. This feature is great when you want to double-check a phone number, date, or other key word that is important in the message.

Protected Voice Mail: One of the biggest points of feedback we heard last release about voice mail in Outlook was that IT administrators wanted a way to prevent voice mail messages from being casually forwarded to other employees. This release, we’ve added support for using Office Rights Management to protect a voice mail message marked private (or if your corporate policy mandates all voicemail messages be marked private). When a message is protected, it cannot be forwarded, but still has the same rich experience in Outlook and OWA.

Call Answering Rules: Another great feature that’s new to the Outlook and Exchange 2010 release is the Personal Call Attendant. The Personal Call Attendant gives you the flexibility to control how your calls are routed when you aren’t at your desk. For example, you can build a call routing guide to give callers the option to contact another employee (perhaps your manager or your back up), forward the call to your mobile phone, or leave a voice message. You can even customize which options callers receive based on whether they are in your contacts list.

This is just a quick look at some of the new features provided by Unified Messaging in Outlook and Exchange. If you’re interested in more details, take a look at the Exchange blog or TechNet.

Ryan Gregg
Outlook PM

Easier Ways to Create and Manage Meetings

2009-10-16T16:24:00Z

Earlier posts about Meeting Requests with a Preview of your Calendar and Introducing Quick Steps might have left you wondering what other improvements Outlook 2010 brings to creating and managing meetings. There are many, and I am glad to give you an overview. Here’s how they can work for you.

Meeting Reply

If an e-mail conversation gets to a point where a meeting would be more useful, just click Meeting Reply to set up a meeting with the people involved in the conversation. It will copy the content of the e-mail conversation into the meeting request, to help keep you within the context of what has already been discussed, and add the recipients to the invitation. All you need to do is choose the time and location.

Meeting Suggestions

The new Meeting Suggestions pane helps you choose a location for the meeting and find a time that works for a majority of people. It suggests the best times to meet on a given day according to the availability of the meeting attendees. And, if you are using Exchange 2010, you can select a building and check available rooms there!

Meetings without a response

Looking at your calendar, you may have found it difficult to differentiate between new meetings that were automatically added to your calendar and meetings you tentatively accepted. It's now easy to tell the difference: meetings that you haven’t yet responded to are dimmed and have a dashed border.

Search for appointments

You can also search for all meetings that you haven’t yet responded to. The new Requests Not Responded To button in the Search Contextual Tab makes that a simple one-click action. It also allows searching for accepted and for tentatively accepted appointments.

Contextual Tab for Calendar

While you look at your calendar you may want to respond to some appointments, propose new times, change your free/busy status, or make other changes. Now you can do that without even opening a meeting. When you click on a meeting, a contextual tab appears and presents commands that are specific to a single instance or a recurring meeting.

Next 7 Days

In addition to the standard 5- and 7-day week views, there’s a new view that shows the next 7 days starting from today.

Schedule View

The new Schedule View shows multiple calendars horizontally -- a very effective way to help teams organize meetings. The Navigation Pane now includes your team and your manager’s team by default, so you can look at everyone’s calendars with just one click. You can also add your own groups by clicking Open Calendar and then the Calendar Groups button.

Copy

Now Outlook 2010 allows you to respond to a meeting right away when you copy it from another calendar, making sure that you will be included in future updates, and the organizer is informed that you are attending.

Copy Tracking Status

Do you organize big meetings with lots of attendees and you need to keep track of who is coming and who isn’t? Maybe you need to reserve a conference room with a table that can accommodate the number of people who have accepted. You can now copy the response tracking status to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else, like Excel! From there you can sort and organize the data just like any other table.

I hope you find these new ways of creating and handling meetings convenient and time-saving!

Rainer Schiller

Outlook Program Manager

Outlook on Facebook

2009-09-26T02:14:00Z

Microsoft Outlook now has its very own fan page on Facebook, which means you now have an easy way to get free tips about your favorite program, share ideas about the ways you use Outlook, and get answers to Outlook-related questions that you’ve always wanted to ask.

The nice thing about joining the Outlook fan page is that it integrates nicely with Facebook’s existing news feed and notification system. You can choose to see Help & How-to tips in your Facebook news feed automatically or read them only when you want to. Similarly, if you post something on the fan page, you can choose to be notified whenever someone responds to you.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how the Microsoft Outlook fan page on Facebook works:

Join the Outlook fan page (it’s free!)

If you already have a Facebook account, sign in, and then follow these simple steps:

Visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/Microsoft-Outlook/82443952619
Near the top of the page, click .

Now you’ll be able to keep in touch and receive updates directly through your newsfeed. See you there!

- The Microsoft Outlook Team

Better Searching in Outlook 2010

2009-09-25T01:54:40Z

A common problem with email searches is that they can return too many results. For example, entering someone’s name may return matches where the name appears in parts of the message’s body even though you meant to look for messages from that person. It can be also hard to enter other criteria to help narrow your search, such as whether it has an attachment or that it has a particular category applied. Wouldn’t it be great if you could specify these parameters easily and get a better set of results - finding what you want even faster? Outlook 2010 makes it easy!

Outlook 2010 makes searching your mailbox more efficient with two new features: the Search Contextual Tab in the Ribbon and the Search Suggestion List.

Search Contextual Tab

The Search Contextual Tab is displayed each time you click into the search box. It allows you to filter your search results using a variety of parameters, including:

· Sender’s name

· Subject keywords

· Presence of attachments

· Categories

· Sent date

· Flagged messages

· The recipient’s name in the TO or CC fields

· Importance

· Read/unread status

· … and many more!

You can use this tab to help you find messages quickly and easily. For example, suppose you are searching for a message with the phrase “Food Blog”, but more than 100 items return matching that query. Let’s suppose you also remember that this message has an attachment. Now you can instantly narrow down the results to a much smaller set to find what you are looking for by clicking the Has Attachments button in the Search Contextual Tab:

And that’s just one of the many filters available in the Search Contextual Tab!

Search Suggestion List

The vast majority of searches contain a combination of keywords, along with the names of the sender or a known phrase in the subject line. Restricting results to a specific sender is a powerful filter that often helps narrow down results quickly.

In Outlook 2010, you will see a list beneath the search box when you begin a query. You can just type and then arrorw down to limit your search to mail from someone or with a specific subject. The results returned will be only those that show a match in the name (or subject) fields against your query!

This is just a taste of the new powerful search capabilities built into Outlook 2010. We hope you enjoy this new experience and that it will help you be more productive each time you need to find a message in your mailbox.

Nelson Siu
Outlook Program Manager

Multiple Exchange Accounts in Outlook 2010

2009-08-26T00:40:00Z

For everyone using the Outlook 2010 Technical Preview, there are a number of improvements for working with multiple Exchange accounts. My name is Andrew Sullivan, I’m a Program Manager working on Outlook and it’s my pleasure to highlight some of these improvements.

Connect to more than one Microsoft Exchange account simultaneously. If you’ve worked with more than one Exchange account in Outlook 2007 or earlier, you may have resorted to using multiple Outlook profiles to access your additional accounts. No more, as Outlook 2010 supports connecting to as many as three Exchange accounts from a single profile.

How do I get another Exchange account into Outlook?

In the Technical Preview, Outlook requires you to use the Mail Applet in the Control Panel to add additional Exchange accounts. In Windows Vista or Windows 7, type “Mail” into the search box in the control panel to find the Mail Applet. In Windows XP the applet is shown in the default Control Panel view.

Once you’ve launched the Mail Applet choose “E-mail Accounts…” and then “New…” From there, the wizard will allow you to add another Exchange account.

What’s the catch?

Your additional Exchange accounts function just like your first Exchange account in almost every way. Some things, however, are different. For example, the To-Do Bar shows appointments only from your default store, not those from additional Exchange account calendars. To view which store is your default click the Office button, then Account Setting, then, choose the Data Files tab.

What else is improved about Multiple Accounts?

The Ribbon in Outlook 2010 is specific to the account at which you are looking. If you click New E-mail in the ribbon while looking at the Inbox of your second Exchange account, your new message will be sent from your second Exchange account.

Who are you sending From?

When you add a second account of any type to Outlook 2010, the new From Picker will show up on new mail messages. This allows you to easily see which account you’re sending from, and just as easily change it.

These are just some of the improvements we made to help you manage multiple accounts in Outlook 2010! Please let us know what you think in the comments.

Andrew Sullivan
Program Manager

Meeting Requests with a Preview of your Calendar

2009-08-20T17:43:00Z

Earlier we’ve shown how Conversations and Quick Steps are designed to help you get through your email faster than ever before. Now, we’d like to show you another feature that will save you time whenever you receive a meeting request!

Handling meeting requests usually involves two important steps – reading the meeting request and checking your calendar to see if you’re available. To save you time, Outlook 2010 simplifies that process and combines those steps into a single experience with the Calendar Preview.

The Calendar Preview shows a slice of your calendar in the meeting request allowing you to read the request and check that date on your calendar at the same time:

Now that you can see your calendar and the meeting request at the same time, you have the convenience of checking your schedule for that day and immediately make an informed decision about whether you can attend the meeting, all without leaving your inbox.

The Calendar Preview also works great with recurring meetings. When you receive a request for a recurring meeting, the Calendar Preview enables you to view each instance of the recurring meeting or just those with conflicting appointments:

With the Calendar Preview, you can confidently handle any meeting request without leaving your inbox because you’ll always know exactly how that meeting affects your schedule.

Cool Trick: If you have a conflicting meeting, double click the Calendar Preview and your calendar will open to that day, allowing you to update your schedule as you see fit.

This is one of my favorite features in Outlook 2010, and I hope you like it too. Please let us know what you think in the comments!

Tom O’Neill
Outlook Program Manager

Introducing MailTips

2009-08-12T19:03:00Z

How often have you sent a message to someone only to receive an Out of Office message in reply a moment later? Or (like me) you might have sent a message to a Contact Group, only to find out too late that group contained hundreds of people – when it happened to me I surely wished I had known in advance.

MailTips make these email “accidents” a thing of the past! As you start adopting Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 in your organization, we believe that MailTips will help make you feel more in control of your mailbox and more confident about the emails you send.

MailTips offer Outlook users real time information about the message they’re composing and the recipients they intend to reach with it. You will immediately know information such as if a recipient is out of the office, if they’re outside of your organization, or how many people are in a conversation group.

MailTips requires Exchange 2010 and is one of the Outlook 2010 features that best embodies the “better with Exchange” motto. As you compose a message, Outlook and Exchange work together to determine if any MailTips apply to your message, and then display them above the address fields. Also the name of the recipient the MailTip applies to is highlighted in the address field.

In the example below, I am trying to send a message to my colleague Andy and a MailTip is returned to indicate that he’s currently out of the office. At this point I can decide what to do, now that I know Andy won’t get to read this message today.

For example, I could remove Andy from the email and add someone else instead – just by clicking “Remove recipient” in the MailTip.

The MailTips space will expand automatically if more MailTips apply:

It is important to point out that MailTips is a lightweight feature with minimal load increase on the Exchange CAS server. The results are returned to the user quickly so they don’t slow down the process of writing and sending messages. We have developed an extensive caching system that saves MailTips info for recipients for 24 hours, therefore reducing the number of times the server needs to be queried. For Mailbox full and Automatic Reply MailTips, the cache is refreshed every hour because we expect that data to change more often. MailTips are displayed for email messages, meeting requests, sharing messages, and task requests.

The Outlook 2010 MailTips cover a wide array of scenarios and issues:

Restricted Recipient	Displayed when you do not have permission to send messages to a specific recipient – if sent the message will not get delivered.
Moderated contact group	Displayed when a contact group has a moderator (a new feature in Exchange 2010) who triages incoming messages and determines whether the message should be delivered to the contact group.
Invalid recipient address	Displayed when the recipient’s address is no longer valid – this can often happen if a recipient address was stored in the nickname cache but the recipient has left your organization since the last time it was used.
Message too large for recipient	Displayed when the size of the outgoing message exceeds the size limit for incoming messages of one or more of the recipients.
Message too large to send	Displayed when the size of the outgoing message exceeds the send message size of the sender.
Recipient Mailbox is full	Displayed when the recipient’s mailbox is full and the message cannot be delivered to them.
Large number of recipients or contact group	Displayed when the number of recipients that the message will be delivered to (either as individuals or as part of a contact group) exceeds a defined value set by the Exchange administrator.
Recipient is using automatic replies	Displayed when a recipient has turned on their Automatic Reply (aka Out of Office) message.
External recipient	Displayed when a recipient is outside your organization.
External recipient in contact group	Displayed when a contact group contains a recipient that is outside your organization.
Additional information	This MailTip is intended to replace messages that might otherwise be sent as an automatic response. Examples of these are messages like "You will receive a response within 72 hours" or "this mailbox is not monitored." They might also be useful for a user who works part time, and might not want to always have an Automatic Reply message set up.
Mailbox quota about to be exceeded	Displayed when the message being composed will push your mailbox quota over the limit and it will not be possible to send more messages until space in the mailbox is freed.

Each of these MailTips can be turned on or off in the MailTips options (accessible in the Mail section of the Outlook options). They can also be turned on or off by the Exchange administrator – ensuring that they can be configured depending on the characteristics of any given organization.

Beside Outlook 2010, MailTips are also a feature of Outlook Web App – for information on the Outlook Live version of the feature, see E.J. Dyksen’s Exchange blog on it. Previous versions of Outlook and Outlook Web App do not support MailTips.

Alessio Roic
Outlook Program Manager

Introducing Quick Steps

2009-07-27T20:19:00Z

This release, Outlook has adopted the Ribbon in the Inbox and all throughout Outlook. The purpose of the Ribbon in Outlook is to help you become more efficient in getting your work done – be that processing e-mail in your Inbox (Mail Home Tab), managing your Calendar (Calendar Home Tab), or doing work in Tasks (Tasks Home Tab). In designing the Ribbons, we strove for consistency so that you’ll always be able to look to the left side to create a new item or to the right side to find a contact – and to the middle to get what you need to do - done. In Mail, the center of the Ribbon is all about Quick Steps.

What are Quick Steps? Quick Steps are easy-to-use one-click buttons which perform multiple actions at once. If you file your mail, they can be a life saver – one click and that conversation is filed away and marked as read. If you send e-mail to the same people over and over – one click and you have a new email to your team. As your work style in Outlook changes, you can configure Quick Steps to work the way you do.

So you like to file your mail… It turns out that 70% of people file mail into folders in Outlook. In Outlook 2007, and every release before that, there were two ways of filing manually: either you dragged it to the folder or you clicked “Move to folder” and choose the folder. Enter Quick Steps: out of the box, the first two Quick Steps are all about filing your mail. The first Quick Step allows you to file mail into a folder (by default the last folder you filed mail into) and mark it as read in one click. The second Quick Step, Move to: ? is there to give you the idea that you could have a series of Quick Steps for each folder you file into regularly.

The first time you click on a Quick Step (other than Forward:FYI, Meeting Reply, or Reply & Delete) you’ll be prompted to set it up.

Once it is set up, you won’t see this dialog again. In this example, you can just click “1-Reference” in the Ribbon to file mail away.

Not into filing? Quick Steps still has something to offer! Have you ever been on a long e-mail conversation and you just need to get into a room and sort it out? Click Meeting Reply and set up a meeting with the people on the conversation. There are also a series of Quick Steps that rely on your corporate address book to help you: To Manager, Team E-mail, and Team Meeting. These default Quick Steps come prepopulated if your company’s address book knows your organization. If not, you can decide who is on “your team” the first time you click them.

Want to create your own? To create your own Quick Step, just click Create New or drop the gallery to use a template from New Quick Step fly out.

If you click Create New, you’ll be able to pick from a list of actions. Note that in this dialog you can also change the icon (just click on the dot in the upper left), pick a shortcut key, and write your own custom tooltip – to help you remember what this Quick Step is for.

Get more sophisticated: Manage your Quick Steps You can rearrange, duplicate, modify, and delete any Quick Step from the Manage Quick Steps dialog. And if you don’t like what you’ve come up with, you can always reset Quick Steps back to the defaults.

Tip: To get to this dialog quickly, just click on the small arrow in the lower right corner of the Quick Steps group in the Ribbon.

One trick to share with your friends Right click on any “move” Quick Step to easily navigate to that folder:

Or hold down the Control key while clicking on the Quick Step to navigate to the folder.

I hope that you enjoy using Outlook 2010 and Quick Steps. Please play around with them: I’d love to know which Quick Steps you use – maybe they will be defaults in the next Beta!

Melissa MacBeth
Program Manager

Note for IMAP users:

If you have an IMAP account and aren’t seeing Quick Steps, there is a known bug that may be the cause. To get Quick Steps back, right click on the Ribbon and click Customize Ribbon, create a new group in the Ribbon, and add Quick Steps to that group.

Connecting to Hotmail accounts in Outlook 2010

2009-07-24T00:04:00Z

Hello everyone. My name is Alessio Roic and I’m a Program Manager on the Outlook product team here in Redmond. Today I will cover how to connect to your Hotmail accounts in Outlook 2010.

In previous versions of Outlook, connecting to Hotmail accounts could be done using one of the following methods:

Creating an HTTP account (also known as DAV protocol) – this allows users to establish a basic connection to their Hotmail mailbox and to synchronize their Inbox only.
Installing Outlook Connector (OLC) 12.1 – the OLC provides a richer experience, as it allows viewing and updating your Hotmail Inbox, Calendar and Contacts in Outlook.

In order to get your Hotmail and Windows Live Inbox, Calendar and Contacts in Outlook 2010 you need to install Outlook Connector 14 (OLC 14). OLC 14 is the next version of the Outlook Connector and it is currently in Technical Preview mode and is to be used with only with the Outlook 2010 Technical Preview.

OLC 14 offers the highest level of reliability and feature richness when connecting Outlook to your Hotmail account

Outlook Connector 12.1 is not compatible with Outlook 2010. However, OLC 12.1 continues to be the recommended method for connecting Hotmail to Outlook 2003 and 2007.
As already announced to all Hotmail users, the DAV protocol will no longer be used starting September 1, 2009 and as such it is not supported in Outlook 2010. For more details, please see the related Windows Live Wire blog.

Let Outlook 2010 determine if you need OLC 14 and install it for you

We are working hard to make sure that the experience of moving to Outlook 2010 is as smooth as possible when it comes to accessing your Hotmail accounts. Outlook 2010 is able to determine when OLC 14 is needed and points you to the correct download location for the OLC 14 package.

This detection occurs in two scenarios:

1. Upgrading to Outlook 2010 with a profile that contains at least one DAV and/or OLC 12 account

If your Outlook profile already included a Hotmail account, Outlook 2010 shows a dialog to indicate that in order to continue synchronizing between Outlook and the service you need to download and install Outlook Connector 14. Clicking on “Upgrade Now” automatically starts the download of the OLC 14 package. Should you choose “Remind me later” you will still be able to browse the previously downloaded data for the Hotmail account, but you won’t be able to synch until OLC 14 is installed.
Once Outlook 2010 is open the following message will be displayed in the main Outlook explorer if OLC 14 is needed:
Should you chose not to download the OLC and dismiss the message, Outlook offers another redirector in the BackStage – just select the Hotmail account in the account picker and the following prompt will appear:
Clicking on the Upgrade Now button will automatically start the download of the OLC 14.

2. Adding a @hotmail.com, @live.com or @msn.com accounts through the Add New Account dialog

Should you choose to add a new account that uses the @hotmail.com, @live.com or the @msn.com domain and OLC 14 is not installed, Outlook 2010 will prompt you to download and install it:

Note: Should you choose not to install the OLC 14, Outlook 2010 will attempt to establish a connection to the server using the POP protocol. However this method only allows downloading your mailbox, while Outlook Connector also lets you view and update their Hotmail and Windows Live Inbox, Calendar and Contacts in Outlook.

Thanks!

Alessio Roic

Outlook Program Manager

What’s up with my Inbox in Outlook 2010?!

2009-07-20T21:01:00Z

Hello Office 2010 beta users! My name is Michael Affronti and I'm a Program Manager on the Outlook product team here in Redmond. We now have the opportunity to talk with all of you about Outlook 2010 and the amazing features we've been hard at work on over the last two years! Over the next couple months we'll be revealing a bunch of the changes and updates in Outlook 2010 right here on the Outlook Team Blog.

Let's start with your Inbox in Outlook 2010. For a long, long time your Inbox has been a lengthy, chronological list of all the emails you have received. We know that for many of our users, dealing with the sheer volume of email they send and receive each day is a daunting and sometimes impossible task. It's been up to you, the user, to wade through the thousands of messages you may have in your Inbox; deleting, filing, and reading individual emails, perhaps wondering if there might be a better way to do those core email triage tasks.

Enter the Conversations experience in Outlook 2010, an entirely new way to take control of your Inbox. You may have used conversation arrangements before in previous versions of Outlook or in other email clients, but in Outlook 2010 we have taken conversations to a whole new level by allowing all of your email to look, act, and function as smart groups of related messages.

All of your emails are now grouped into conversations based on the subject of the mail. A random sampling of internal Microsoft employees' Inboxes averages a 40% reduction in the number of items seen in the Inbox! All this is from simply grouping and hiding the older, redundant content of conversations. A single-click on a conversation item will show you the content of the latest email in the thread, enabling you to quickly read and triage an entire set of messages.

"Hey, what about the stuff I've sent in that conversation?!" We've got you covered! If you expand a conversation you'll get to see all of the older messages that make up that conversation, and you'll even see your Sent Items right inside the conversation – since the email messages you send in a conversation are just as important as those you receive:

If you're an email filer we'll also seamlessly show you items in the conversation you've filed in any other folder in your mailbox:

So no matter what your workflow is for storing and organizing your email, the new Conversations experience in Outlook 2010 always shows you the entire conversation every time, everywhere.

Who replied to who? Outlook 2010 makes it even easier to tell who replied to who inside of a conversation. Click on any individual message inside of a conversation to see a dotted line that shows which messages it replies to. This can be useful when a reply comes into a conversation that actually responded directly to an earlier message in the conversation, like Michael Affronti's message in the conversation below:

Speed up your triage by acting Conversationally. By grouping all the related emails in a conversation together into a single item, Outlook 2010 allows you to save time by easily deleting, moving, categorizing, or marking the entire conversation as read in one click. Once you categorize a conversation, Outlook 2010 will automatically categorize new items that arrive in that conversation! The time savings can be significant – in one internal test, Microsoft employees reduced 46% of the actions needed to triage their Inbox in the new Conversations experience, as compared to Outlook 2007's Date arrangement.

Reply and Reply All are smarter too, and will always reply to the latest message in the conversation. If you happen to open an older message in the conversation and hit Reply – say a flagged mail from the ToDo Bar, for example – Outlook 2010 has you covered with a new clickable warning will appear that allows you to instantly jump to the latest message in the conversation.

Ever have a distracting email flare up in your Inbox? The new Ignore button quickly and easily moves an entire conversation and any future items that arrive to your Deleted Items folder. Now you won't have to waste time deleting each new email in your co-workers' ongoing conversation about where to go to lunch today – that is, of course, if unless you're hungry.

Want to slim down your Inbox? Try the new Clean Up button and watch it move all the older, redundant messages in your conversation to the Deleted Items folder:

Clean Up always keeps the most recent message around, ensuring you have all the content in the conversation while allowing you to delete the redundant messages. This can be a very effective way to free up some much-needed space if you have a small mailbox quota. Clean Up is even smart enough to keep messages that have attachments, flags, or categories. Clean Up is available on an individual conversation or a whole folder, and can be customized to move the redundant content to any folder in your store. For example, you can move the cleaned-up messages to an archive or filed folder in your mailbox, making it the ultimate Monday morning triage tool.

We've spent the past couple years building you a great new experience for reading and triaging your email in Outlook 2010. Let's summarize what the new Conversations experience 2010 can do for you…

Reduce the amount of visual information in your Inbox by collapsing conversations into single items.
See the entire conversation everywhere, including your sent items and the messages you've filed.
Help you understand who replied to who when reading complex conversations.
Speed up your triage by making almost every email action Conversational.
Quickly hide annoying emails using the new Ignore button.
Trim down the size of your Inbox without losing information by deleting older, redundant content using the new Clean Up button.

On behalf of the entire Outlook Conversations Feature team, we hope you enjoy the new Inbox experience in Outlook 2010!

Thanks!

Michael Affronti
Outlook Program Manager

Announcing Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview

2009-07-14T03:23:00Z

Today, Microsoft is proud to announce the release of Office 2010 Technical Preview – our first official preview release of the next wave of Office PC, mobile and web-based productivity offerings. Of course, as part of this release, I’m personally excited to tell the Outlook community more about our latest work in Outlook 2010 – we talked a bit about what’s new when the Exchange 2010 Beta was announced, and today there is even more information to share and ways to get involved. You can start by watching this introductory video on Outlook 2010:

See What's New in Microsoft Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 has an amazing set of world-class communications tools and time-saving productivity improvements to offer, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to start this next step in our journey towards releasing this product. From personal productivity tools like the ribbon and Quick Steps, to business-class communications with Office Communicator and Exchange Server, Outlook 2010 provides you with a world-class experience to stay productive and stay in touch with all of your networks.

Over the next several months, the Outlook engineering team will post a series of blog articles outlining various features and scenarios that are essential new components of the Outlook 2010 experience. I’d like to invite you all to stay involved by joining us on your favorite social network below, as well as staying tuned to this blog.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/microsoftoffice

Twitter: www.twitter.com/office

YouTube: www.youtube.com/officevideos

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=1913738&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Lastly, while the Office 2010 Technical Preview is a limited release, we will continue to provide more information about broader access for trying out Outlook and Office as we near the Beta 2 milestone later this fall. Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy learning more about Outlook and Office 2010!

Dev Balasubramanian

Outlook Product Manager

The Power of Word in Outlook

2009-06-24T22:17:00Z

This morning we became aware of a Twitter campaign run from the website http://fixoutlook.org. This campaign is intended to provide Microsoft with feedback about our decision to continue to use Microsoft Word for composing and displaying e-mail in the upcoming release of Microsoft Outlook 2010. The Email Standards Project, which developed the website that promotes the current Twitter campaign, is backed by the maker of “email marketing campaign” software.

First, while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages. You can read more about this in our whitepaper, outlining the benefits and the reason behind using Word as Outlook’s e-mail editor.

As an example, here are some images that show some of the rich e-mail that our customers can send, without having to be a professional HTML web designer. In addition to the familiar formatting toolbar, Outlook offers powerful Word tools such as automatic styles and templates, charting tools, SmartArt, and richly formatted tables for our professional customers.

SmartArt	Drawing and Charting tools


Table and Formatting tools	Mini Toolbar for formatting

Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world. We have always made information available about what HTML we support in Outlook; for example, you can find our latest information for our Office 2007 products here. For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers.

We are focused on creating a great e-mail experience for the end user, and we support any standard that makes this better. To that end, Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers.

As usual, we appreciate the feedback from our customers, via Twitter or on our Outlook team blog.

-- William Kennedy
Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team
Microsoft Corporation

Google Apps Sync Disables Outlook Search

2009-06-17T03:56:26Z

The Outlook team has recently been made aware of a serious bug / flaw with the recently announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and as a result we wanted to provide the Outlook user community with additional details around this problem as well as information on how to address it.

The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data. When a Google Apps user installs the sync plugin for Outlook, the plugin modifies a registry key which disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies upon the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken as a result. It is also important to note that uninstalling the plugin may not fix the issue.

Outlook users who are considering the Google Apps Sync plugin should become aware of this issue. If you have already installed this plugin, please take note of the steps below to address the issue.

For Outlook users who have already installed this plugin or have experienced this issue, the only remedy is to change the registry key that was modified by the plugin (click the link for more detail on the registry key):

1) Press the Windows Key + R on your keyboard, and type “REGEDIT”. This will open the Windows Registry Editor.

2) Browse to the following: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search"

3) You will manually have to reset the value of “PreventIndexingOutlook” to “0” (without the quotes). To do this, right click on the “PreventIndexingOutlook” key, select “Modify…”, then change the value data to “0”.

4) Close the registry editor.

The Outlook team has been made aware of a second issue that affects users of the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which syncs Windows Live Hotmail with Outlook. When a user has the Outlook Connector installed, then installs the Google Apps Sync plugin, the next time Outlook is started an error message comes up stating that “some functionality will be disabled”. The Google Apps Sync plugin modifies a registry key that is used by the Outlook Connector, which results in users seeing this error message. When confronted with this error message, we recommend that users click “Yes” to enable functionality. The Outlook Connector will then continue to function normally. The Outlook Connector will reset this registry key to the correct value.

Finally, we have brought these issues to Google’s attention, and have offered to work with them to find a resolution for our mutual customers. As soon as this is done, we will publish more information.

Dev Balasubramanian

Outlook Product Manager

Living in Outlook: Voting Buttons

2009-06-13T04:04:49Z

The Living in Outlook series is about sharing tips and workflows around real-world scenarios. We’ll start the conversation with a topic – you can add to it by posting your tips and workflows in the comments!

I use Outlook to help me organize both my work and personal lives. Sometimes I need to get a consensus from my friends or coworkers regarding a decision that we should make. These can range from t-shirt sizes to favorite meeting times to which soccer game we should go see!

Voting buttons are a great way to quickly and easily get answers for any question you may have. In the example below I’ll show you how I picked the best day to go see a Seattle Sounders FC soccer game with my coworkers.

Creating a message with voting options

1. Launch a new e-mail window

The first step is to create a new e-mail message and click on the Use Voting Buttons button in the Options tab in the ribbon.

2. Choose template choices or create your own

While there are 3 default options that work for a variety of questions, using a custom set of voting answers will be more appropriate for choosing a date for a soccer game. Click the Custom… entry item to enter your own.

3. Add your custom choices

In this dialog you need to type your choices into the textbox by separating them with a semicolon (;).

For this example I wanted my coworkers to choose from the 3 available game dates of May 30th, June 13th and June 17th which appear as “May 30th; June 13th; June 17th" in the Message Options dialog.

Then when you are finished click the Close button.

5. Confirm your choices

Congratulations, you have just created voting buttons! To confirm the choices that the recipients will be able to choose from go back to the Options tab and click on the Use Voting Buttons button again to see your custom choices.

6. Send your e-mail

Now that you have confirmed your choices, fill in the rest of your e-mail (recipients, subject, body, etc.) and send the message!

7. Check the responses

The responses will show up as new items in your Inbox as the recipients vote – this is very similar to seeing Accept and Decline responses for meeting requests.

8. Check the results

You can look at the running tally of responses by clicking on the blue message bar in any of the response e-mails and choosing View voting responses.

This will launch a new window where you can see the total number a votes as well as a list of individual responses.

We hope that you find using Voting buttons useful and as always, feel free to post a comment and tell us how you use Voting Buttons.

Jed Brown

Outlook Program Manager