Take Control of Your Inbox

As you can see, Office Outlook 2007 is about a lot more than e-mail, but e-mail takes up a large chunk of our time during the day. Office Outlook 2007 includes a number of new features that can save you a huge amount of time and effort—from setup techniques to content delivery to search options and junk e-mail filters, Office Outlook 2007 works faster and smarter to help you free up time you can spend getting more done.

Automatic Attachment Previews

Now instead of double-clicking an attachment and waiting for it to open in another application, you can preview attachments to your e-mail messages with a single click. This is a great timesaver and enables you to decide quickly which attachments you need to spend more time with and which ones you can file, respond to, or delete right away. To preview an attachment, click the attachment, and the file displays in the body of the e-mail message.

Find What You Need Faster

The same indexing technology used in Windows Desktop Search and Windows Vista is used in Office Outlook 2007, giving you the fastest access possible to your information in all views (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks). You will notice a dramatic decrease in the time it takes to display search results—now you can find what you need almost as fast as you can type.

A new search box is displayed at the top of the Inbox column and at the top of the Tasks List. Click in the search box and the display will change color, indicating that it is selected. You can simply type the word or phrase you want to find (see Figure 10-15). Even before you finish typing), results display messages (or tasks) that contain the word or phrase you’re searching for.

You can add search criteria to find specific items faster. Click the Add Criteria button to choose the criteria you want to add to your search (see Figure 10-16). You can also easily repeat searches you’ve done previously by clicking the Show Instant Search Pane button to the right of the search box; then point to Recent Searches and select the search you want to use (see Figure 10-17, on the next page). Additionally, you can change the defaults set up for the search process by choosing Search Options in the Instant Search Pane menu.

Turning E-Mail into Action Items Instantly

Part of the challenge of working with e-mail effectively is dividing the messages we need to act on right away from the messages we can respond to later. In Office Outlook 2007, you can use the enhanced flagging feature to identify an important message as one you need to act on immediately. When you add the flag, the item is automatically added to the To-Do Bar.

Flagging Action Items for Others

You can also use the enhanced flagging feature to flag messages you send and receive. If you have just finished the draft of a new employee handbook, for example, you might send it in an e-mail to others working on the project, requesting their feedback by the end of the week. You want them to respond by a specific date, so you flag the message for follow-up. Because the message is flagged, when it arrives in their Inboxes, the message is added to their To-Do Bars as a task with a specific response date (see Figure 10-18).

Easy E-Mail Setup

Setting up an e-mail account is now much easier in Office Outlook 2007. A new automated account setup feature simply asks for your e-mail account name and password, and then does the rest (see Figure 10-19). The wizard finds the server settings, automatically sets up the account, and then displays an updated E-Mail Accounts dialog box with the new account and the location for the account’s PST file. There’s nothing more to do except check your e-mail! The new mail folder is displayed in your Personal Folders list in the Mail navigation pane.

Creating and Sharing Electronic Business Cards A fun and functional new feature in Office Outlook 2007 enables you to create, save, and share your contact information with others as an Electronic Business Card. In the New Contact window, click Business Card in the Write tab to customize the default card that is created for a new contact. You can add photos and other special design elements. You can easily send electronic business cards to others via e-mail or attach your business card to your outgoing messages. Simply choose Options from the Tools menu and click the Mail Format tab in the Options dialog box. Click Signatures to display the Signatures and Stationery dialog box; then click Business Card in the Edit Signature area to display the Insert Business Card dialog box so that you can select the card you want to attach to your messages.

Receive RSS Feeds in Office Outlook 2007

Since Office Outlook 2003 was introduced, RSS has become a widely popular method of receiving content from the Web. With so many interesting—and necessary—Web pages to browse, we can spend hours online searching the sites we have come to rely on for dependable or interesting content. If those sites have RSS feeds available (meaning the information in published and distributed by the content publisher via RSS technology), you can receive those feeds directly in your Office Outlook 2007 Inbox, significantly reducing the time you once spent browsing—and giving you access to that great content whenever you want it.

To use the RSS feature in Office Outlook 2007, double-click the RSS Feeds folder in your Personal Folders in the Mail navigation pane. A window appears, describing the basis of RSS and telling you how to get started (see Figure 10-20).

Improved Junk E-Mail Filters

Office Outlook 2007 includes an enhanced Junk E-Mail Filter that catches incoming messages that could be junk mail—or its more dangerous counterpart, a phishing message—and then intercepts and eliminates it for you. The Junk E-Mail Filter scans incoming messages to determine their content and structure, and even tracks messages that look suspicious and disables any links that might lead you to a potentially dangerous site. When a message arrives that Office Outlook 2007 suspects might be a phishing message, a notification alerts you, and images and links in the message are disabled until you approve them.

On the Watch for Phishing

Phishing is a potentially dangerous form of junk e-mail that involves an unscrupulous sender who distributes an e-mail message that masquerades as a message from an organization you know and trust—perhaps your bank, a popular site that you visit often, or your mortgage company. The people sending these phishing messages often use the same logo, font, and design as the legitimate company’s messages. They ask you to click a link that looks legitimate in the e-mail message, but actually links you to their site, in which they ask you to “verify” personal information. Sometimes these messages include warnings designed to alarm the recipient, such as “We believe someone has tried to access your account and we need you to log in and verify your personal information.” Do not click the links in these e-mail messages. When you click to respond and then enter your personal information, these “phishers” gain access to your bank and credit card accounts, Web sites where your personal information is stored, and more.

Office Outlook 2007 includes phishing protection settings that are automatically enabled when you begin using the program. The options that control phishing protection are found in the Options tab of the Junk E-Mail Options dialog box (see Figure 10-21). Be sure to leave these two options selected to help protect you from phishing scams. To learn more, visit www.microsoft.com/athome/security/email/phishing.mspx.

Automatic Postmarking

A new feature in Office Outlook 2007 automatically adds postmarks to messages you send. The postmark includes the list of recipients and the time you sent the message, which is what makes the postmark valid as an identification of that unique message—spammers send thousands of e-mails out at one time from the same computer, which makes a unique postmark impossible. The e-mail program of the person receiving the postmarked e-mail recognizes the message as authentically from you and not likely to be spam.

Improvements for Exchange Server 2007 Users Office Outlook 2007 includes some additional new features that are available for people using Exchange Server 2007. Here’s a quick list of some of the improved or added features: Create different Out Of Office messages. Now you can better control the messages you give to people who are trying to contact you when you’re out of the office or busy. You can schedule your Out Of Office Assistant for specific times—with a start and end time—so you don’t have to remember to turn the feature on and off. Additionally, you can create different away messages so you communicate to different audiences in different ways. For example, if you’re going off-site for several days, you might leave an internal message that encourages team members to call your cell phone or contact your assistant; for external contacts (clients and vendors, for example), you might provide a message saying that you are out of the office and will contact them when you return. Include voice and fax messaging in your Inbox. Now you can arrange to have voice mail and received faxes delivered directly to your Inbox so Office Outlook 2007 literally becomes the communications hub at the center of your day.

2007 Microsoft Office Outlook Behind-the-Scenes Interview Jessica Arnold, Office Outlook 2007 Program Manager Do you have a favorite new feature in Office Outlook 2007? It’s hard to choose one feature in Office Outlook 2007 that I could claim as my favorite because there are so many new features that I use on a daily basis. However, I probably use the new Instant Search capability more frequently than any other—probably about 20 times a day! Because of the flexibility of the interface, I no longer waste time looking for an e-mail that might be buried among thousands of other e-mails. Using Instant Search, I can use just a few keywords to locate the piece of information I need, no matter in which folder it might be stored. Do the changes come about as a result of user feedback? How so? We take user feedback into account for every release of Office Outlook. When we looked at planning Office Outlook 2007 and redesigning the user interface, we went on customer visits and collected thousands of hours of data to understand what we could do to improve the user experience and positively affect users’ daily lives. From this data, we identified trends and key areas for investment that the development team used to propose and design features that we believe will have a significant impact on the way our customers work. Does Office Outlook 2007 have what you think will be a “home run” feature that everyone will be talking about? I think the improvements to time and task management will be incredibly useful for our users. The To-Do Bar, task integration with other Office programs, and the calendar really provide a great solution for users to be more effective and thus have more time to focus on the daily things that matter most. Do you have a fun or interesting story about what it was like for you to be involved in this major release? One of the most interesting and exciting parts about being involved in this release is seeing all of the little things that go into shipping a product such as Office Outlook 2007. From the number of pixels that go into the follow-up flag icon on the user interface to the addition of new languages that Office Outlook 2007 will be offered in, it takes an amazing amount of coordination and collaboration among our teams to put together a product that we’re really proud of. Seeing these pieces develop over the past two years and come together has been an incredible experience.