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Table of Contents

Overview of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Manage Time and Information

Connect Across Boundaries

Remain Safer and in Control

Manage Time and Information

Quickly Find the Information You Need

Instant Search

Color Categories

Microsoft Office FluentUser Interface

Attachment Preview

Easily Manage Your Daily Priorities

To-Do Bar

Flagging Mail as Tasks

Flagging Mail as Tasks

Task Integration on the Calendar

Improved Scheduling Capabilities

Connect Across Boundaries

Put Relevant Information at Your Fingertips

Integration with Windows SharePoint Services Information

RSS Feed Integration

Auto Account Setup

Easily Share Information with Anyone, Anywhere

Enhanced Calendar Sharing Capabilities

Calendar Overlay

Electronic Business Cards

Integration with Office InfoPath 2007

Sharing Requests

Improved Out-of-Office Capabilities

Unified Messaging Using Exchange Server 2007

Remain Safer and in Control

Effectively Control Which E-Mail Reaches You

Outlook E-Mail Postmark

Anti-Phishing and Junk E-Mail Technologies

Keep Personal and Company Information Safer

Information Rights Management Technology

Managed Folders

Free/Busy Information Management

Summary

Resources

System Requirements

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Overview of Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Welcome to Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007, included in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The Microsoft Office system, an integrated system of programs, servers, and services, provides an accessible and comprehensive set of tools for people who rely on working with information efficiently and productively.

The Office Outlook 2007 messaging and collaboration client provides an integrated solution to help you better manage your time and information, connect across boundaries, and remain safer and in control. This comprehensive information and time manager helps you organize and quickly search for the information you need. With Office Outlook 2007, you can share information with coworkers, friends, and family with enhanced security, no matter where they are located. And it makes it easier for you to prioritize and control your time, so you can focus on the things that matter most.

This document provides an overview of Office Outlook 2007, with an emphasis on new and improved features. It will also take a look at Office Outlook 2007 in action to demonstrate its new capabilities.

Manage Time and Information

Office Outlook 2007 makes it easier for you to locate, manage, prioritize, and act on the volume of e-mail you deal with every day. Powerful new features help you save time finding the information you need, so you can focus on your most critical work.

  • New! Instant Searchmakes it possible for you to search through all of your e-mail, e-mail attachments, calendars, contacts, and tasks, helping you find the information you need much faster.
  • New! To-Do Bargives you a consolidated view of your daily priorities by integrating tasks, e-mails flagged for follow-up, upcoming appointments, and calendar information in one convenient place.
  • New! Color categories helpyou create and assign customized categories to any type of information, so you can organize and quickly search your information and visually distinguish items from one another.
  • New! Flagging Mail as Tasksprovides a way foryou to create tasks from e-mail in one simple step.
  • New! Task integration on the calendar provides an interactive way to work with your tasks and flagged mail by dragging them onto your calendar to schedule time to complete them.
  • New!Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface makes composing, formatting, and acting on e-mail easier and more intuitive.
  • New! Attachment Previewmakes it possible for you to preview attachments in the reading pane, giving you quick insight into e-mail attachments and speeding decision making.
  • Improved! Scheduling capabilities make scheduling meetings for large groups using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 easier by suggesting ideal meeting times and locations.

Connect Across Boundaries

Dramatically improve the way you share information with coworkers, friends, and family. With new calendaring technology and contact design enhancements in Office Outlook 2007, you can connect across platforms, saving you time and improving collaboration.

  • Improved! Integration with Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services informationgives you the ability to connect to documents, calendars, contacts, or tasks stored on Windows SharePoint Services sites and have full editing capabilities whether you are online or offline.
  • New! Calendar publishing through Microsoft Office Onlinemakes it possible foryou to easily post and share your calendar information.
  • New!Calendar Snapshots provide an easy and visual way to share calendar information with people outside of your organization.
  • New! Calendar overlay mode makes it possible for you to view and navigate multiple calendars at once.
  • New! RSS feed integration enables Really Simple Syndication (RSS) subscriptions to be delivered directly to your inbox.
  • New! Outlook Mobile Service is a feature of Outlook that you can use to send and receive text and picture messages between Office Outlook 2007 and any mobile phone.
  • New!Electronic Business Cards provide an easy way for you to customize your contact information, making contacts more personally relevant and easier to locate.
  • New!Auto Account Setup gives Office Outlook 2007 the tools to easily set up your Exchange Server, POP, and IMAP e-mail accounts using only your e-mail address and password.
  • New! Integration with the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 information-gathering program gives you the ability to embed an InfoPath form within an e-mail message to gather information, and then export it to Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheet software for analysis.
  • New! Sharing requests make it easy for you to share your information by giving permissions to Office Outlook 2007 folders to anyone using Exchange Server 2007.
  • Improved! Out-of-office capabilities using Exchange Server 2007give you the ability to schedule your auto-response messages for a specified date and time and send different messages to internal and external contacts.
  • New! Unified messaging using Exchange Server 2007enables Office Outlook 2007 to understand message types of all kinds, so you can have voicemail and faxes delivered along with e-mail to your inbox.

Remain Safer and in Control

Office Outlook 2007 gives you greater safety and more control over the information that reaches you, with simplified ways to track sensitive company information and spot unwanted or malicious e-mail.

  • New!Outlook E-Mail Postmarkhelps ensure that e-mail reaching your inbox is legitimate and that mail sent by Office Outlook 2007 will be trusted by the recipient’s computer.
  • New and improved! Anti-phishing and junk e-mail technologies help prevent both junk and malicious e-mail from entering your inbox.
  • New!Managed Folders, used with Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, help companies enforce e-mail retention, storage,and archival policies on workers’ mailboxes, including ways to designate other users’ access to these folders.
  • Improved! Information rights management (IRM), integrated in all Microsoft Office system programs, helps you protect your company’s confidential business information when you send e-mail messages or documents to others.
  • Improved! Free/busy information management, used with Exchange Server 2007, gives you the ability to determine and set a variety of levels as to who can view your free/busy information, keeping you in control of your personal data.

Office Outlook 2007 in Action

As the site manager for Fabrikam, Inc.’s Web site, Adam Barr oversees the work of all site writers, designers, and producers, and he maintains the production schedule. Adam works with many vendors who live in different cities and even states. Now that he is using Office Outlook 2007, Adam finds it simpler to manage his e-mail, calendar, and tasks. He can also easily share information with his team members, wherever they are located.

Manage Time and Information

Workers everywhere are tasked with managing increasing amounts of e-mail and other information daily. Most of us are overwhelmed by the volume of e-mail we receive and waste valuable time trying to locate needed information. Adding to the difficulty, tasks are often contained within e-mail, making it hard to track and manage them. Projects can also contain tasks in multiple locations, dispersing information and delaying decision making.

To help you better manage your time and information, Office Outlook 2007 offers a number of new and improved features, from Instant Search to integrating tasks on the calendar. These features make it easier for you to locate, manage, prioritize, and act on the volumes of information you deal with every day.

Quickly Find the Information You Need

Office Outlook 2007 offers a range of new features that save you time by making it easier to find the information you need.

Instant Search

With new and powerful integrated Instant Search, you can quickly locate the information you need, whether it’s in your e-mail, calendar, contacts, or tasks. Type in a keyword, and Instant Search quickly searches your Outlook data, highlighting the locations where that search term appears. Instant Search does “word-wheeling,” which means that results begin to appear as soon as you start typing your search terms.

Instant Search can search broadly across all your Outlook items and folders, or you can specify a search within a particular folder in a given location. Instant Search even searches for keywords within e-mail attachments. You also have the flexibility to create queries with different Outlook criteria like date, from, color categories, mail importance, and more, and Instant Search finds and delivers the results.

Figure 1: Instant Search helps you locate the information you need, when you need it.

Color Categories

New color categories give you a quick, visual way to customize and distinguish items from one another, making it easy to locate information. Suppose, for instance, that you want to assign a color category to all items related to a certain project. You can add the same color category to mail, calendar, or task items so that you can easily locate all items from a project at a glance. When you need to find the information later, you can search and sort by color categories to quickly and visually identify what you are looking for.

Figure 2: Adding a color category makes it easy to organize and search your information.

Microsoft Office Fluent User Interface

Office Outlook 2007 has the Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface that makes it easier and more intuitive for you to compose, format, and act on your e-mail. You can now access all of the rich features and capabilities in Outlook in an easy-to-find location within your e-mail message.

Figure 3: Composing an e-mail message is easier in Office Outlook 2007
with the Office Fluent user interface.

Attachment Preview

Accessing attachments is often a tedious, multi-step process. In previous releases of Outlook, there was no easy way to gain insight into an attachment without opening it. With Attachment Preview, you can view your attachments in one click directly from within the reading pane. This saves you time because you can view attachments in context with the e-mail message.

Figure 4: Attachment Preview gives you easy insight into e-mail attachments with one click.

Office Outlook 2007 in Action

With Office Outlook 2007, Adam can quickly manage his e-mail and locate the information he needs to make the best decisions for his team. With new Instant Search, Adam can search all of his Outlook information for a given item and get quick results. He can also easily search and sort his information by project, because he assigns color categories to project-related e-mail and calendar items. Finally, Adam can get quick insight into his e-mail attachments by using the Attachment Previewer to open attachments with one click and view them within the context of the e-mail message.

Easily Manage Your Daily Priorities

Office Outlook 2007 provides the tools you need to manage your daily to-do list, with technologies to prioritize and sort your tasks integrated into the user interface.

To-Do Bar

Tracking your tasks can be time-consuming, because often they are implicitly contained within e-mail or stored in other locations. The new To-Do Bar integrates your tasks, e-mails flagged for follow up, upcoming appointments, and calendar information in one convenient place. It also includes tasks from the Microsoft Office OneNote® 2007 note-taking program, Microsoft Office Project 2007, and Windows SharePoint Services Web sites. The To-Do Bar gives you a consolidated view of your priorities for the day, so you do not have to waste time checking multiple locations to plan your schedule.

Figure 5: The To-Do Bar gives you a consolidated view of your priorities.

Flagging Mail as Tasks

Often tasks are contained within e-mail, so getting tasks into your task list used to mean manually entering the information. With new mail flagging in Office Outlook 2007, that is no longer the case. With Flagging Mail as Tasks, you can create a task from your e-mail in one simple step. Simply right-click to flag your message and designate a date for completion. The item is then added to your To-Do Bar and the due dates are integrated automatically into your calendar.

Figure 6: Easily convert ane-mail message to a task by flagging it.

Task Integration on the Calendar

Previously you may have scheduled fake appointments on your calendar to account for the time your tasks would take. Office Outlook 2007 integrates tasks on the calendar in the Daily Task List so that you see them displayed beneath your daily appointments and meetings. To allot time for working on a task, you simply drag the task onto your calendar. When you complete a task on a given day, the task “sticks” to that day, providing a visual record of the work you performed. Tasks you do not complete roll over to the next day and accumulate until you mark them as complete.

Figure 7: View and work with your tasks and calendar in an integrated manner.

Improved Scheduling Capabilities

Improved scheduling capabilities in Office Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 help you schedule meetings easily and in less time. Exchange Server 2007 looks at the attendee list and recommends an ideal meeting time and location.

A number of other improvements in Office Outlook 2007 make the calendaring experience easier for people using Exchange Server 2003 or Exchange Server 2007. When changes are made to the meeting location or agenda, you receive an informational update rather than having to reaccept the meeting. Additionally, Office Outlook 2007 highlights the changes in the meeting update, making it easier to locate the information that has been modified. All of these changes were designed to make scheduling and updating meetings easier for both the organizer and the attendee.

Figure 8: Scheduling meetings with Office Outlook 2007 is easier using the
recommended times provided by Exchange Server 2007.

Office Outlook 2007 in Action

Adam’s tasks are often buried within e-mail. Using the new To-Do Bar along with task integration on his calendar in Office Outlook 2007, Adam can now track and manage his priorities more efficiently. He can also easily coordinate his tasks with tasks in Office Project 2007 and Office OneNote 2007, as well as Windows SharePoint Services sites. When Adam receives an e-mail message with a task implied within, he simply right-clicks the message to create a task that appears on his To-Do Bar. In this way, Adam never loses track of his daily priorities.

Connect Across Boundaries

With today’s geographically dispersed workforces, workers need a streamlined and reliable way to share information with coworkers and customers. Exchanging calendar and contact information is slow and cumbersome—particularly if people are working on different platforms. It is sometimes difficult to even find the contact information you are looking for without visual cues like photos or company logos. And requesting Outlook data from others is not always easy to do. Furthermore, organizing different types of information, like RSS feeds, shared documents, or other shared information, can be difficult without having designated folders or easy ways to manage this content.

To help you connect with others who are working in different locations and on different platforms, Office Outlook 2007 delivers significant enhancements, from easier calendar sharing to native RSS support and the integration of Windows SharePoint Services information. As a result, you can easily connect across boundaries, saving you time and dramatically improving the way you share information and collaborate with coworkers, friends, and family.

Put Relevant Information at Your Fingertips

Office Outlook 2007 puts you in touch with the information you need every day by bringing relevant information directly to your inbox.

Integration with Windows SharePoint Services Information

During the busy workday, it can be difficult to get through all of the e-mail, tasks, and information that are sent to you for review or comment. Travel time, whether it is commuting on a train or plane, provides a good opportunity to follow up on this kind of work.

Office Outlook 2007 now provides even deeper integration with Windows SharePoint Services, so you can interact with information stored on SharePoint sites at any time. You can connect to Windows SharePoint Services shared calendars, contacts, or tasks from Office Outlook 2007 and have full editing capabilities when you are online or offline. So if you connect to your shared team calendar from your team SharePoint site in Outlook, you can easily add an item to the team calendar without ever leaving Outlook. The next time Outlook synchronizes your calendar, the SharePoint server is also updated. Plus, if your teammates have subscribed to this calendar, they will receive any updates from the SharePoint server directly into their Outlook calendars.