Tech @ FuryTech

A great new feature in Outlook 2010 is Quick Steps. It lets you quickly apply a set of commands on an email. So, if you want to have a quick step to reply and delete the email, you can do it, or you can make a quick step to forward the email to everyone in your project team and then move it to a specific folder.

The best way to think of them is as highly configurable rules that can be run on demand. Outlook 2010 comes with a few examples, and makes it very easy to make your own. They can be accessed from the main ribbon, or by right-clicking on an email.

I just finished installing the Office 2010 beta, and it’s looking like they’ve made a ton of changes since the technical preview.

I’ve not had a chance to do too much with it yet, but here’s what I’ve noticed changes with so far.

First and foremost, most of the interfaces have been cleaned up a lot. Everything is much cleaner and smoother looking. Most if not all of the placeholder icons are gone, and replaced with actual icons.

Speed has been greatly improved. Outlook 2010 seems to be much snappier, especially on IMAP.

Outlook 2010 also has added a social connector bar at the bottom of your emails. To be honest, it looks very similar to Xobni, and is quite impressive. It has an option for other social networking plugins, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of plugins are released.

Only real annoyance is that it doesn’t support upgrading from the technical preview, so you’ll have to uninstall that first. But, it’s not that big of a deal.

I’ll have further updates as I use the program more.

I’ve been using Outlook since the early days of 2000. I love the program. It’s incredibly powerful, and most of the time, if I can think something up that I’d like to do, it can handle it. There have been a few minor issues, such as no synching of emails, but there were workarounds (Osasync) or different methods (IMAP), but nothing really obnoxious.

Well, with one exception. Outlook gives you the option of assigning categories to calendar items, tasks and contacts. They’re marked with a color, so you can quickly tell what they’re a part of. For the tasks and calendar, the colors are in plain site regardless of the view you choose.

Now, it would make sense that the contacts would work the same way. I mean, in the business card view, there’s that small gray band at the top of each card. But no, there’s no way to see what category the contact is a part of unless you open the contact, which isn’t really great for on-the-fly identification. The closest work around I’ve found is to group by category, but that’s not really suitable for me.

I was hoping that they were going to fix this in Outlook 2010, but as of yet, they’ve not.

Another change that they’ve made with Office 2010 is a new screen where you can upgrade your copy of Office to a higher version. This screen can be found in the revamped Office information screen, where you can check for updates, view your license information, and change your options.

I’ve had a chance to work with the Outlook 2010 Technical Preview, and so far, I’ve been very impressed. The first difference you’ll see between 2010 and 2007 is that Microsoft added the Ribbon interface to 2010. The Ribbon interface has remained fairly controversial, with a lot of mixed opinions. I personally am a fan, it seems to be a lot more efficient.

Outlook 2010 has streamlined the new email screen, making it much easier to see which account you’re emailing from if you have multiple email accounts that you use. It also lets you quickly delete people from your autocomplete in the To and CC fields. That alone is worth the upgrade in my book.

Another huge change they’ve made with 2010, is a completely revamped print dialog. It shows you exactly what you’re going to get printed, and makes it much easier to change settings compared to what 2007 allowed you to do.

Those are some of the major mail related changes. For those of you who are wondering, some Outlook 2003/2007 plugins still work. OsaSync ran without any issues, however, I couldn’t get Xobni to display correctly. Hopefully there will be an update for Xobni soon.

I’ve found 2010 to be very stable, even with a multiple gigabyte PST file. The only times I’ve run into issues were with plugins that didn’t work with 2010.

Outlook 2010 is shaping up to be a must-upgrade product. Lets hope no major issues crop up between now and when they release it.