Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog

Developing a provider for the Outlook Social Connector

2009-11-19T22:49:00Z

I’m happy to announce that a new member has joined the Outlook platform family. The new arrival has a long and formal name known as Microsoft Outlook Social Connector Provider Extensibility, but the name shouldn’t stop you from getting acquainted with this exciting new extensibility feature for Outlook 2010!

What is an Outlook Social Connector (OSC) provider?

The Microsoft Outlook Social Connector is an add-in that surfaces social network data including friends, profiles, activities, and status information from social networks in Microsoft Outlook. The user interface of the OSC is shown below:

The OSC obtains social network data using an OSC provider, which provides the abstraction layer between the OSC and the APIs offered by social networks.

If the provider implements the required OSC provider extensibility interfaces and is registered with the OSC, the data from the social network becomes available to Outlook so that an end user can view social data in the context of the Outlook user interface. OSC providers can be developed by third parties or individual social networks that want to expose their social data in Outlook. Think of an OSC provider as a translation layer between Outlook and your favorite social network. Another great scenario for corporate customers is to create a provider that connects to a in-house business application, and surfaces business information about people directly inside of Outlook. The provider extensibility stack is represented by the following diagram:

How do I develop an OSC provider?

You can develop an OSC provider using the development tool of your choice. When you develop an OSC provider, you are not writing MAPI or Outlook Object Model code. The OSC core engine handles writing activity or contact information to the user’s default store. Your OSC provider simply hands back XML to the OSC core engine when methods are called on the required interfaces. The XML should conform to the OSC schema defined by OutlookSocialConnector.xsd. Each OSC provider is built on a set of required interfaces that must be implemented by your provider code. The interface contract is defined by a type library installed with the OSC, socialprovider.dll. The documentation for the required interfaces is available in the following MSDN technical article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee829696(office.14).aspx

An OSC provider can be written using managed languages such as Microsoft Visual C# or Microsoft Visual Basic, or unmanaged languages such as Microsoft Visual C++. Any tool that can create a COM-visible DLL component can be used to develop an OSC provider. The decision to use a managed or unmanaged language to develop a provider should take into account the download size and dependencies of the provider installation package.

An OSC provider must be COM-visible as defined by the following:

After installation, an OSC provider must be registered using COM self-registration or regsvr32.
COM registration of an OSC provider DLL registers the provider under HKCU or HKLM.
A provider’s ProgID is registered under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\SocialConnector\SocialProviders
An OSC provider developed in a managed language (that is, a managed OSC provider) is COM-visible.

Is sample code available?

All developers love sample code that helps to unleash their creativity, so of course sample code is available! To get started, take a look at the sample code available on http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/odcOL14OSCProvider:

TestProvider, a Visual C# sample provider that implements all interface members required for the Beta version of the OSC
The OSC schema, OutlookSocialProvider.xsd
Provider templates that you can use to develop your own provider in the following languages:
- Visual Basic .NET
- C#
- C++

How do I learn more?

To learn more about OSC provider extensibility, read the technical article on MSDN and download the sample provider and provider templates. Be aware that the OSC interfaces and members might change between the OSC Beta and the final release of Outlook 2010.

If you represent a social network or are interested in developing an OSC provider for your favorite social network or line of business application, contact us at oscprex@microsoft.com and we will consider enrolling you in the OSC provider extensibility preview program.

Randy Byrne
Outlook Program Manager

Announcing the Outlook Social Connector

2009-11-18T17:33:00Z

We are excited to announce the Outlook Social Connector!

The Outlook Social Connector is a set of new features to help keep track of your friends and colleagues while enabling you to grow your professional network. The Outlook Social Connector is available now as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta.

The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) brings social views of your colleagues and friends right to your Inbox. As you read your e-mail messages, glance down at the new People Pane to see the picture, name, and title of the sender. A rich, aggregated collection of information about the sender is included.

The OSC presents useful information including:

Communication history Your mailbox is searched and the recent messages you’ve exchanged with that person appear. Can’t remember the last time you e-mailed this person? A quick look at the OSC reveals the last time you received an email from them, and one click opens up the message.
Meetings When is the next scheduled meeting with this person? The OSC shows upcoming appointments that include you and the message sender.
Attachments Can’t find the attachment that the person is referring to in a message? With the OSC you can quickly review attachments that you and the sender have exchanged. One-click access quickly opens the attachment or you can see the message that it is attached to.
Activity feeds Stay on top of activities involving your colleagues and friends in real time. The OSC connects to business and consumer social networks.
Did you say activity feeds? Yes we did! The OSC makes Outlook 2010 a social networking tool by connecting to the new social experiences in SharePoint 2010. That connection allows the OSC to download activity feeds for colleagues and display them inside the new People Pane:

You’ll see rich information about your colleagues’ activity such as profile updates to their MySite, documents and websites they tag, and changes to their personal status message.

Know who you’re meeting with. Use the OSC’s Gallery View to see all of the people you’ll be interacting with in an upcoming meeting:

One click on any of those pictures puts you into the single-person view, providing easy access to their activities and communication history. You can easily switch in and out of Gallery View by clicking on the little double-arrow icon in the upper-right corner of the People Pane.

Build your network. The OSC makes it easy to grow your network; by clicking the ‘+’ symbol underneath a person’s picture, you can send a request to be their colleague on any of the networks you are connected to. The OSC also automatically synchronizes your colleagues from each of your connected networks and saves them as contacts in Outlook. This allows you to easily send messages, call, or synchronize contacts just as you would any other Outlook contact.

Open Connectivity. The OSC in Outlook 2010 will connect by default to the new social networking experiences in SharePoint 2010. We are happy to announce that connectivity to any network, including SharePoint, is built using our public ‘provider’ extensibility platform:

This means that anyone can build a provider to connect the OSC to a social network, their company’s line-of-business applications, or literally any system that can produce streams of activity about its users. The SDK will be publically available tomorrow on MSDN, and my colleague Randy Byrne will be making a more detailed post on provider development with links to the SDK at that time. We are excited to make this platform public and are looking forward to feedback as our customers begin developing providers for their networks and business solutions.

Go Live! Next year we will be releasing a provider for Windows Live, enabling you to connect to your friends and colleagues on Windows Live right inside of Outlook:

You see pictures, profile updates, and personal status messages of your friends from Windows Live Messenger. See their Office application and document activity through SkyDrive integration, and the aggregation of dozens of other third-party sites from around the world.

Are you working with other social networks? You bet! Outlook has partnered with LinkedIn, the online professional networking site, to provide an amazing connected experience for our shared customers. The LinkedIn team has built a provider for the OSC using our public SDK, providing you with pictures and activity information for your colleagues directly from their network. Simply click on a message from a co-worker to discover what new connections they’ve made on LinkedIn, or click the LinkedIn badge underneath a photo to jump right to a person’s profile page on the Web.

Keep watching the Outlook Team Blog for an announcement about when the LinkedIn provider is available to Outlook 2010 users. You can learn more about the LinkedIn provider here on their website.

Customize it! Does your company use a large system for managing information about its users or customers? By building an OSC provider to connect to your ERP or CRM solution, you can easily sync down people-related information into Outlook and see it in the People Pane when you’re reading your mail. Randy will have more information in his post about how to build a custom provider.

Let’s recap! The Outlook Social Connector, new to the Outlook 2010 Beta, provides you with:

The People Pane A name, picture, and title for your colleagues whenever reading a message from them.
Rich history See a rich communications history for each person that sends you messages with one-click access to the most recent messages and attachments.
Activities Download and see real-time activity for your colleagues from business and social networks.
Get friendly Request someone as a colleague or friend with one click. Synchronize those colleagues with Outlook and keep them up-to-date as their information changes.
SharePoint 2010 Connect to the new MySite social networking experience right out of the box with the OSC & SharePoint 2010.
Extensible A public SDK allows anyone to build a connection to business or consumer social networks.

On behalf of the entire Outlook Social Connector feature team, thanks for trying the Outlook 2010 Beta. Have fun using the OSC!

Michael Affronti
Social Networking Addict & Outlook Program Manager

Announcing Microsoft Office 2010 Beta

2009-11-18T17:23:00Z

Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Office 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for download at www.microsoft.com/2010. This is an exciting and significant milestone for both the Office and Outlook teams, because it means that for the first time, anyone can download Office 2010! You can learn more about the complete release of the Office 2010 beta on our Office blog.

The Outlook team is particularly excited for a number of reasons – the beta release represents the latest and best version of Outlook 2010 we’ve been working on. Features that we’ve discussed on this blog in recent months – Conversation Arrangement, Quick Steps, Mail Tips, Calendar Preview, Multiple Exchange Accounts and more – are all now publicly available and accessible through the beta for anyone to try today. In addition to the features we’ve already discussed here, we’ve invested a great deal between the Technical Preview release and today’s beta around the user interface, performance, and overall fit and finish. Finally, we are introducing a great new feature today, the Outlook Social Connector.

In addition to the beta release, the Office team has also done a great deal of work to improve our online content and experience, and you can see the latest information on Office 2010 and more by visiting the newly designed Office.com.

The beta is a significant milestone in the development of Office and Outlook 2010, but we’re not done yet! Our final and official release of Office 2010 is still slated for the first half of 2010, and I encourage you to keep in touch with us on this blog to learn more as we enter the final phases of our development efforts to release Office 2010.

Finally, I’d like to personally thank everyone who has been involved with our efforts to release the beta today – in addition to the Outlook engineering team, there have been countless customers and partners who have given us invaluable feedback along the way to help make this beta what it is today. I know I speak for all of them when I say go download the beta of Office 2010 and enjoy!

Dev Balasubramanian
Outlook Product Manager

Best Practices for Outlook 2007

2009-11-12T02:51:00Z

On the Outlook team, we are frequently asked: “what is the ‘right way’ to use Outlook?” Sure enough, there is no “right way” to work in Outlook—but, as the product team, we did design it with certain best practices in mind. Specifically, there are some best practices that make you more efficient at getting your job done while using Outlook, including:

how to set up Outlook (layout, rules, folders, etc.),
how to best process e-mail messages to “tame your Inbox”
the importance of doing a daily review of your calendar and tasks
how best to get work done in Outlook
doing effective searches
the do’s and don’ts of writing great messages
how to best manage your calendar and set up meetings

The end result is a new article on Microsoft Office Online tailored towards end users for how to best use Outlook. (There is one long article that contains the full set of best practices and also a series of shorter articles focused on specific areas.) The last section of the article includes an FAQ to help explain some of the rationale behind the suggestions, along with help on how to migrate to this system from other ways of working.

The starting point of the entire document is based on some basic principles of good time management. Here is an excerpt (which can also be found in this article):

Basic principles of good time management

Outlook 2007 is a tool to help you manage your e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks. As such, it is at the center of not only your communications but also your time-management. To get the most out of Outlook 2007, we suggest a few basic principles:

Reduce the number of places you read e-mail Filter all of the messages you need to read into one place — your Inbox — using a series of rules.
Let some e-mail pass by Use rules to send e-mail you need to read to your Inbox and then let the rest flow into distribution list folders, untouched. You don't need to read every message sent to you. Only the important ones should go to your Inbox. Remaining messages can be useful to keep — in case you get looped in on an issue, for example.
Reduce the number of places where you manually file messages Reduce the mental tax of filing by relying on search to locate messages.
Process your e-mail using the 4 Ds When reading a message, decide whether to:
- Delete it.
- Do it (respond or file for reference).
- Delegate (forward) it.
- Defer it (using categories and flags) for a second review in your task list.
Reduce your to-do list to one list Use a single to-do list and calendar to manage what you need to do.
Work in batches Use categories to help you group similar tasks together.
Use good judgment when sending e-mail Follow the dos and don'ts of writing great e-mail. Review your time and tasks regularly.

Even if you don't subscribe to all of the best practices described here, following just a few will improve your experience with Outlook 2007.

Note for IT admins: the article includes Word and PDF versions of the online content which can be adapted to the needs of your customers. For example, if you don’t use SharePoint in your organization, you can remove all references to SharePoint in the Word copy of the document. You can then deploy the customized version.

Hopefully, you will find these best practices useful, and as always, we appreciate your feedback.

Enjoy!

Melissa MacBeth
Outlook Program Manager

Exchange 2010

2009-11-11T01:38:00Z

On behalf of the entire Outlook team, I’m pleased to congratulate the Exchange Server team on the global availability of Exchange 2010! The Exchange team has done a tremendous job designing, developing, and refining their latest release to be the most high quality, efficient and innovative release of Exchange Server to date.

In the near future, you will be hearing more from us as Microsoft Office 2010 reaches its public Beta, but for now, please take a minute to learn more about the exciting improvements and advances the Exchange team has made with this release. Exchange Server will continue to be the premier messaging platform and partner for Outlook thanks to their work with Exchange 2010.

-- William Kennedy

Corporate Vice President

Office Communications and Forms Team

Exchange 2010 Press Coverage

Exchange 2010 Keynote by Stephen Elop, President Microsoft Business Division

Exchange 2010 Keynote by Rajesh Jha, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Exchange

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