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It’s time to blog about Outlook 12! This space will be dedicated to sharing news of the upcoming release of Outlook, part of the Office 12 suite. I’ll talk about what we did, what we didn’t do, how it fits with the rest of Office, and some of the process we’re using to build Outlook.

 

First, let me introduce myself. I started at Microsoft in 1991 as a programmer on Microsoft Word. I was the development manager for Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2003, and I’m currently the General Manager of the Outlook team. By some odd quirk of fate, I’m also the acting lead of the Outlook design team, which handles the feature design for the product. (These feature designers are called “program managers” inside of Microsoft.)

 

But enough about me. Outlook is the star here.

 

I hear from customers (and my friends, relatives, co-workers…) all the time about how they spend tons of time in Outlook. Clearly it’s a widely-used app. It’s a huge thrill to work on it every day, but it comes with a bunch of responsibility, too. Our job is to be super careful to deliver features that will really solve customer problems.

 

In Outlook 12, I hope we’ve done just that. There are three major themes to the work we’ve done in Outlook 12:

  • Manage your time & information
  • Connect across boundaries
  • Remain safe & in control

Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss each of these areas and the features we’ve done to support each one.

 

I hope that by the time Outlook 12 ships that I’ll get a chance to discuss work we’ve done with the Outlook Calendar, RSS subscriptions, Tasks, Search, SharePoint synchronization, new user interface, attachments, Exchange Server, account configuration, the offline experience, IMAP improvements, sharing, electronic business cards, etc. It’s a long list.

 

By the way, I’m going to try really hard NOT to use the word “user” when I refer to people who use Outlook. (I remember hearing 20 years ago that only two industries have “users:” drugs & computers.) I’ll try to use the term “customer” since these are indeed the people who buy our products. Please forgive me if I slip up and user the u-word.

 

With my next post, I’ll start talking about some of the specific problems we’re trying to solve with Outlook 12.