Many users have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Outlook — it’s the standard email and calendaring application in many organizations, yet it often doesn’t enable them to work as productively as they’d like, spawning a veritable cottage industry of add-ins.
The Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview shows that Outlook 2010 will include a number of productivity-boosting enhancements that should appeal to a wide cross-section of users, from the novice to the seasoned pro. Here are my top five productivity enhancements in Outlook 2010.
Backstage View. Personally, I think the addition of the Backstage View in Office 2010 applications sets a new level of application accessibility and usability, especially in Outlook 2010. Clicking on the Office button gives you access to Outlook settings and account information, including account settings, automatic replies to email, mailbox cleanup, and rules. Bringing all this information into one interface should be a boon to productivity, since users will no longer have to hunt around for management features in various Outlook menus. Read the rest of this entry »
A new iPhone app called reMail gives iPhone users the email archive search functionality available in applications like Gmail and Outlook. reMail is priced at $4.99 until September 1st ($9.99 after that date). The creator of reMail is Gabor Cselle, who has previously worked on Gmail at Google, and who was the VP Engineering at Xobni, an Outlook add-on which has previously been reviewed at WWD.
The iPhone does have Spotlight search already built-in, but Spotlight has a limitation. It can only search what is stored on your phone. For an email account, this means that it can only search a couple hundred messages, not the account’s entire archives. And how often is the email you are searching for one of the most recent two hundred? In my case, the answer is rarely. Read the rest of this entry »
While my first impressions of the next version of Microsoft Office, Office 2010, were quite positive, I did have one major disappointment. Why didn’t Microsoft make Outlook 2010 more social? I was hoping that the venerable email application would gain support for social media.
While email is still king in many organizations, it would be useful to be able to access Twitter, LinkedIn ,and even Facebook directly from Outlook.
Even though Microsoft hasn’t officially added support for social media to the next version of the app, you can customize Outlook 2007 and add social features yourself. Here is a quick overview of some add-ins that can help you make Outlook more social. Read the rest of this entry »
While some productivity and project management mavens may decry using Microsoft Outlook for managing projects, it’s often the one application that people keep open at all times on their Windows desktops. MissingLink Project Center from Moore Software Solutions is a lightweight add-in that makes project management features available in Outlook. You can purchase it for $49, with a 30-day free trial available. Can it help you to manage projects without having to add a separate app into your toolbox?
Read the rest of this entry »
How many times have you wished for a simple and easy way to create and export email lists by mining your email inbox?
Wait no more! Clear Context, a San Francisco-based start-up that makes an in-box management plug-in for Microsoft Outlook has come up with a new product called, Contact Exporter for Outlook. Of course you will need their inbox management plug-in, a for-pay product.
The Contact Exporter is a beta feature in ClearContext IMS v4 that lets you create and export groups of email addresses found in messages stored in the Outlook folders you select.
What it essentially does is create a list of email addresses found in messages from a set of folders users choose. And these can be used to create distribution lists. You can create say, an email list for a birthday invite and export the list in the CSV format. You can export files and import them into any application that will allow you to import CSV files. Facebook and Socialzr are two such web services. I think this export feature is quite handy. If you want to know more, check out their website.
Email remains one of the most important means of communication and Microsoft Outlook is the client of choice for around 400 million computer users worldwide. Anil Dash considers it a platform in its own right, albeit with its own share of problems and vulnerabilities. Microsoft has made many improvements, but some of the best innovations around the Microsoft Outlook are coming from little start-ups. Today, I want to bring to attention three interesting add-ons that make Outlook more useful. Continue Reading @ GigaOM
Many users have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Outlook — it’s the standard email and calendaring application in many organizations, yet it often doesn’t enable them to work as productively as they’d like, spawning a veritable cottage industry of add-ins.
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