Ishan Amin’s Blog

This morning we became aware of a Twitter campaign run from the website http://fixoutlook.org . This campaign is intended to provide Microsoft with feedback about our decision to continue to use Microsoft Word for composing and displaying e-mail in the upcoming release of Microsoft Outlook 2010. The Email Standards Project , which developed the website that promotes the current Twitter campaign, is backed by the maker of “email marketing campaign” software . First, while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages. You can read more about this in our whitepaper , outlining the benefits and the reason behind using Word as Outlook’s e-mail editor. As an example, here are some images that show some of the rich e-mail that our customers can send, without having to be a professional HTML web designer. In addition to the familiar formatting toolbar, Outlook offers powerful Word tools such as automatic styles and templates, charting tools, SmartArt, and richly formatted tables for our professional customers. SmartArt Drawing and Charting tools     Table and Formatting tools Mini Toolbar for formatting Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world. We have always made information available about what HTML we support in Outlook; for example, you can find our latest information for our Office 2007 products here . For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers. We are focused on creating a great e-mail experience for the end user, and we support any standard that makes this better. To that end, Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability . The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers. As usual, we appreciate the feedback from our customers, via Twitter or on our Outlook team blog.  — William Kennedy Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team Microsoft Corporation

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The Power of Word in Outlook

The Outlook team has recently been made aware of a serious bug / flaw with the recently announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and as a result we wanted to provide the Outlook user community with additional details around this problem as well as information on how to address it. The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data. When a Google Apps user installs the sync plugin for Outlook , the plugin modifies a registry key which disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data , not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies upon the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken as a result. It is also important to note that uninstalling the plugin may not fix the issue . Outlook users who are considering the Google Apps Sync plugin should become aware of this issue. If you have already installed this plugin, please take note of the steps below to address the issue. For Outlook users who have already installed this plugin or have experienced this issue, the only remedy is to change the registry key that was modified by the plugin (click the link for more detail on the registry key): 1) Press the Windows Key + R on your keyboard, and type “REGEDIT”. This will open the Windows Registry Editor. 2) Browse to the following: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsWindows Search" 3) You will manually have to reset the value of “PreventIndexingOutlook” to “0” (without the quotes). To do this, right click on the “PreventIndexingOutlook” key, select “Modify…”, then change the value data to “0”. 4) Close the registry editor. The Outlook team has been made aware of a second issue that affects users of the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which syncs Windows Live Hotmail with Outlook. When a user has the Outlook Connector installed, then installs the Google Apps Sync plugin, the next time Outlook is started an error message comes up stating that “some functionality will be disabled”. The Google Apps Sync plugin modifies a registry key that is used by the Outlook Connector, which results in users seeing this error message. When confronted with this error message, we recommend that users click “Yes” to enable functionality. The Outlook Connector will then continue to function normally. The Outlook Connector will reset this registry key to the correct value. Finally, we have brought these issues to Google’s attention, and have offered to work with them to find a resolution for our mutual customers. As soon as this is done, we will publish more information.   Dev Balasubramanian Outlook Product Manager

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Google Apps Sync Disables Outlook Search

The Living in Outlook series is about sharing tips and workflows around real-world scenarios. We’ll start the conversation with a topic – you can add to it by posting your tips and workflows in the comments! I use Outlook to help me organize both my work and personal lives. Sometimes I need to get a consensus from my friends or coworkers regarding a decision that we should make. These can range from t-shirt sizes to favorite meeting times to which soccer game we should go see! Voting buttons are a great way to quickly and easily get answers for any question you may have. In the example below I’ll show you how I picked the best day to go see a Seattle Sounders FC soccer game with my coworkers. Creating a message with voting options 1. Launch a new e-mail window The first step is to create a new e-mail message and click on the Use Voting Buttons button in the Options tab in the ribbon. 2. Choose template choices or create your own While there are 3 default options that work for a variety of questions, using a custom set of voting answers will be more appropriate for choosing a date for a soccer game. Click the Custom… entry item to enter your own. 3. Add your custom choices In this dialog you need to type your choices into the textbox by separating them with a semicolon (;). For this example I wanted my coworkers to choose from the 3 available game dates of May 30th, June 13th and June 17th which appear as “May 30th; June 13th; June 17th" in the Message Options dialog. Then when you are finished click the Close button. 5. Confirm your choices Congratulations, you have just created voting buttons! To confirm the choices that the recipients will be able to choose from go back to the Options tab and click on the Use Voting Buttons button again to see your custom choices. 6. Send your e-mail Now that you have confirmed your choices, fill in the rest of your e-mail (recipients, subject, body, etc.) and send the message! 7. Check the responses The responses will show up as new items in your Inbox as the recipients vote – this is very similar to seeing Accept and Decline responses for meeting requests. 8. Check the results   You can look at the running tally of responses by clicking on the blue message bar in any of the response e-mails and choosing View voting responses .   This will launch a new window where you can see the total number a votes as well as a list of individual responses. We hope that you find using Voting buttons useful and as always, feel free to post a comment and tell us how you use Voting Buttons . Jed Brown Outlook Program Manager

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Living in Outlook: Voting Buttons

As you may have seen, in the past week there have been various reports of a scam / phishing e-mail that targets Outlook users by falsely claiming that it is an official message from Microsoft, asking users to visit a phishing website where they are prompted to enter their e-mail server information, user name, and password. Do not click on the link in this e-mail, or enter any of your personal information on the corresponding site. We wanted to let all of you know that this message is absolutely not from Microsoft , and to take the following precautions: Microsoft (and the Outlook team) will never ask for your personal information via e-mail. In general, do not click on attachments or links in e-mail messages unless you completely trust the source / author of the message. Keep your Junk E-mail filters up to date; the easiest way to do this is to run Windows Update, either by clicking on Windows Update in the Start Menu, or going to www.windowsupdate.com . By following these as well as other general tips for e-mail safety , you can ensure that malicious e-mail or phishing scams such as these do not pose a threat to you as you use Outlook, or any e-mail client / service. You can find a sample screenshot of the phishing e-mail on the Trend Micro blog, here . Thanks, The Outlook Team

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A Note on Recent Phishing Attacks Against Outlook Users

You might ask: What are Exchange Client Extensions (ECEs) and why does this deprecation matter to me? For most Outlook users, this announcement will not concern you. However, if you are a developer that uses Exchange Client Extension interfaces to build a solution in Outlook, then this deprecation is significant because you will have to redesign your solution for Microsoft Outlook 2010. Exchange Client Extensions (ECEs) represent an extensibility feature introduced with the Microsoft Exchange client in 1995. The Exchange client was a 16-bit mail application running against the earliest versions of Exchange Server. ECEs must be written in native code, typically using C++ and relying heavily on the Messaging API ( MAPI ). When Outlook replaced the Exchange client, ECEs were used to extend Outlook 97-98 until COM Add-ins replaced ECEs in Outlook 2000 as the primary extensibility technology for Outlook. ECEs will continue to operate as expected in Outlook 2007 and earlier. However, ECEs will not load in Outlook 2010. Outlook 2010 has converted its own ECEs such as Delegate Access, Deleted Items Recovery, Exchange Extensions commands, and Exchange Extensions property pages to native Outlook code. To redesign your solution, you should consider the following options: Rewrite your ECE as a COM Add-in using native or managed code. Unlike ECEs, an add-in represents a strategic extensibility technology that is fully supported in Outlook 2010. Using an Outlook add-in, you can build Outlook form regions and extend the Office Fluent User Interface . For additional information, please visit the Outlook Developer Portal on MSDN. Rewrite your ECE as a Windows service application using native code and MAPI. If you are writing a Windows service application, you must use MAPI to access Outlook items rather than the Outlook object model. If you are a developer, we’d like to hear your feedback about this announcement. Let us know if you plan to redesign an ECE and your concerns about parity between ECE interfaces and the Outlook object model. Randy Byrne Outlook Program Manager

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Announcing the deprecation of Exchange Client Extensions

The Outlook team is very pleased to announce the official release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, the culmination of months of hard work to bring our users performance and reliability improvements which have been tested and shown to significantly improve the speed and responsiveness of Outlook! This Service Pack is the result of a large and directed effort to make your Outlook 2007 experience great and we think that you will be pleasantly surprised. The Outlook team targeted your most common daily workflows and made them faster and more dependable. Significant improvements were also made in the areas of launching, synchronizing and reliably searching with Outlook 2007. Users with small to average size mailboxes will see a 26% performance increase and users with large mailboxes will see a 35% performance increase in the following areas: Faster startup and more reliable shutdown Faster folder switching between folders with a large number of messages Better overall responsiveness when performing common tasks For more detailed information on Service Pack 2 performance benchmarking read the following report from Principled Technologies, an independent 3 rd party performance analysis company. The report includes detailed test results on different hardware types and with both small and large mailboxes, so it will give you an idea of how much faster Outlook will perform based on your environment. We previously blogged about the February Cumulative Update which was a large collection of fixes designed to quickly address problems that were preventing Outlook 2007 deployments. Service Pack 2 is a collection of those fixes and more that has been thoroughly tested and all Office 2007 users should feel confident installing it on their machines. To experience these improvements install the service pack today and let us know how much faster and better Outlook is for you! For more information about Outlook SP2 improvements see the whitepaper here . You can use Microsoft Update to install Office 2007 Service Pack 2 by clicking here and then choosing “Check for updates” in the left-hand column. Note: Upon successful installation of the update, the first time Outlook is run there will be a one-time delay as Outlook optimizes your data files as shown by a progress dialog (pictured below). After this initial process, performance will be improved. If you have already installed the February Cumulative Update Outlook will not need to repeat this optimization, so you will not see this one-time delay on startup. The Outlook Team

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Announcing the Release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2!

An organized mailbox is critical to getting work done, especially if most of your day involves working with Outlook. However, spending more time organizing your mailbox means there’s less time to spend on real work – thus it’s important to find a system that is both simple and efficient. In this post I will talk about one way you can triage mail using categories and Search Folders. Keep in mind that no single e-mail management method is ideal for all work styles; this is just one method of many and if you’re looking for a change you might want to give this a try and see if it works for you. If you haven’t already, I suggest you install the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007 , as it has performance updates for Search Folders. This triaging technique is aimed at quickly working through a long list of e-mail and deciding which e-mails need your attention now, and which ones can wait until later. By the end of this post you’ll know how to triage each new e-mail with a couple quick clicks and you will have easy access to the messages that need your attention throughout the day. Setting Up your Mailbox In order for this to work you will need a set of categories that represent what actions you need to take with any given e-mail. In this post I will assume you already have the following categories created (To create categories, go to Edit | Categorize | All Categories , then click New ): Response Needed – Use this for e-mails that you need to follow up on. If something is extra important it should probably get a response right away – everything else can get this category. Read Later – Use this for e-mails that don’t need a response, but should get read eventually. Referen ce – This category will be for e-mails that contain information that will be useful to access easily later. Person al – And finally, a category for non-work-related e-mails just to keep them separate from the rest. You may recognize this set of categories is similar to other mailbox management techniques, like Getting Things Done. Now let’s set up the search folders you will be using to help manage your mailbox. You will need one search folder for each of the categories above. Here’s how to make them: Right-click Search Folders in the Navigation pane and select New Search Folder. You will see a dialog like the one on the right. Scroll down and select Categorized Mail from the Organizing Mail group. Click the Choose… button and select one of the categories above. Click OK. You need to restrict this search folder to only searching your Inbox (and sub folders) – otherwise it will include messages from your Sent Items and Deleted Items folders. To do this, right-click the Search Folder in the Navigation Pane and choose Customize this Search Folder . Then click the Browse button, uncheck the top box titled “Mailbox”, and check the box next to “Inbox”, like in the picture on the right. Click OK to close the dialogs, and you’re done! You’ve just created a Search Folder for the first category! Repeat this for each additional category above. The last search folder we need to create is going to replace your Inbox as the place you look for new mail because you’ll only want to see mail that has not yet been categorized. Creating this search folder is a little more complicated: Right-click Search Folders in the Navigation pane and select New Search Folder.   Scroll down and select Create a custom Search Folder (it’s at the very bottom of the list). Click Choose… and you’ll see a dialog like the one on the right. Specify a name for this new Inbox like “New Mail” and then click Criteria… . In the Criteria window that pops up click the Advanced tab. From the Fields selection box choose Frequently-used Fields | Categories. Finally, set the Condition to ‘ is empty ’ and click Add to list . Close the window by clicking OK . You’ve just created a search folder that will show all mail that does not have a category – this will be your new Inbox! Note: it may take a while to build the search folder if your mailbox is large – initially it will contain every mail in your mailbox. Like before, you need to restrict this search folder to only searching your Inbox (and sub folders). Right-click the Search Folder in the Navigation Pane and choose Customize this Search Folder . Then click the Browse button, uncheck the top box titled “Mailbox”, and check the box next to “Inbox”, like in the picture on the right. Now there are a few final touches to make this system useable. First, add all of these new Search Folders to your Favorite Folders by right-clicking on each search folder and choosing Add to Favorite Folders . Now they’ll be at the top of your Navigation pane and easy to access. Next, remove your Inbox from the Favorite Folders area by right clicking it and choosing Remove from Favorite Folders – you won’t need to access this folder directly anymore. Finally, you probably have a ton of e-mail in your New Mail Search Folder. There are a couple ways you can get rid of them: If your e-mail was already sorted into folders that have purposes like the categories you created above, select all the mail in those folders and apply a category If not, you can safely transition to this new system by creating an ‘Old’ category and marking all of your existing mail with this category. This way you’ll be able to start with a fresh ‘New Mail’ folder without worrying about losing that old e-mail – you could even create a search folder for it! Of course, if it’s a small amount of e-mail you could categorize it with your new categories. Alright, we’ve finished with the setup work – now let’s start using this new system! Quickly Triaging Mail Whenever a new e-mail arrives it will show up in the New Mail search folder, so you should treat this as a replacement to your Inbox. To triage your e-mail right-click the empty category symbol and apply a category (e.g. Read Later) – that e-mail will immediately leave the New Mail Search Folder and appear in the respective Search folder – quick and easy! An empty New Mail folder means there’s no new e-mail for you to triage – you’re caught up and can spend time responding to messages (which are already neatly listed in a search folder) or doing other work. There are a couple ways to work with the ‘Response Needed’ and ‘Read Later’-style folders to track which ones you’ve already seen. You can: Use the read/unread status of the mail Click the flag icon twice (to make it into a checkmark) Delete the e-mail (after you’ve responded to an e-mail, you have a copy in your Sent Items) Change its category to something like ‘Done’ (it will disappear from the current folder) All of these options will work and you should pick the one that best suits your work style. In this e-mail management system you should aim to keep the New Mail folder empty by applying categories to each message within it – otherwise the system will break down and won’t be useful to you. That’s It! I hope you’ll find that this e-mail management system saves you time by making it quick and easy to sort and access your mail in a way that helps you get the most important work done first. Seeing the message counts next to each kind of Search Folder can even help you know how much work you have left. If you are interested we’ll share additional e-mail management strategies in the coming weeks. Let us know in your comments what you think of this system, how you’ve changed it to best fit your work style, and if you want to hear more! Tom O’Neill Outlook Program Manager

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Triaging Mail with Categories and Search Folders

The Outlook team would like to congratulate our friends in Exchange for announcing the Beta 1 availability of Exchange 2010 , which together with Office 2010 represents the next wave in the Microsoft Office product family! This next wave of Office-related products will enable you to be more productive across the PC, phone, and browser. Outlook 2010, together with Exchange, will continue to improve productivity with the ultimate inbox experience, through innovative end-user technologies such as: MailTips – Warn users before they commit an e-mail faux pas such as sending mail to large distribution groups, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization, helping protect against information leaks and reducing unnecessary e-mail messages. Conversations Management – Not only will Outlook 2010 provide the ability to view, sort, and categorize emails as conversations – using tools like Clean Up and Ignore , people can simply combine related messages to reduce inbox clutter or ignore irrelevant e-mail conversations altogether. Familiar Outlook Experiences on Web & Mobile – Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile will provide powerful experiences to Outlook users in web browsers and on Windows Mobile devices to complement Outlook 2010. Key features and experiences around conversations view, search, and connecting with people will be delivered to you on the go, geared specifically for a web browser or a Windows Mobile phone to keep the experience lightweight and fast. Outlook 2010 represents the latest in our work to creating a powerful and intuitive e-mail client, providing you with a rich set of e-mail management tools to manage your personal and professional life while staying in touch with the people that matter most. New innovations in user interface, search, and people photos are just some of the bold, exciting experiences that await Outlook 2010 users. In this next wave, Outlook will make accessing your e-mail and connecting with people wherever you are – on whatever device you choose – seamless and easier than ever before. Outlook 2010, along with the rest of the Office 2010 client, will be available for trial in an upcoming technical preview which is slated for Q3 of the 2009 calendar year. This technical preview is meant for people used to testing out software in its initial development stage, and will be followed by a broad public beta, where millions can download and try out Office 2010. We hope you’re excited and ready to join us again as we continue in this journey towards shipping the next great release of Outlook! The Outlook Team

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Outlook and Exchange 2010 – The Next Wave

I am pleased to announce we have released an updated version of Outlook Connector 12.1. This version addresses a few issues that were reported since the December release of 12.1. For details on what has changed in this update, please see the Frequently asked questions about Outlook Connector 12.1 KB article. Update availability If you are using the 12.0 version of the Outlook Connector, or if you had already installed the original version of Outlook Connector 12.1 (version 12.0.6414), you will be automatically required to upgrade when you boot Outlook and try to synch your Hotmail account. The following dialog will be displayed: If you have not installed Outlook Connector yet, you can download the latest version from the Microsoft Download Center . Please make sure to restart Outlook once the latest version of the Outlook Connector is installed to ensure the add-in is correctly installed. Release version For all languages, the version of the new Outlook Connector 12.1 release is 12.00.6423.1000. Once again, thanks for all your feedback and for using Outlook Connector. Alessio Roic Outlook Program Manager

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Updated Version of Outlook Connector 12.1 Available

About two months ago, we wrote about how Outlook can automatically expand acronyms using the AutoCorrect feature of Microsoft Word. Since it is April fool’s day, we’d like to show you how to use that feature against your co-workers for a good laugh! Traditionally, autocorrect fixes misspellings. You can, however, tell it to change correctly spelled words to misspelled versions or different words entirely! The next time a co-worker accidentally leaves his or her computer unlocked, follow the directions in this post and update a few of their AutoCorrect rules. Here are some ideas: Names – tell autocorrect to misspell their name. For example, if her name is ‘Ashley’, have autocorrect change it to ‘Ashlee’ and watch how many mails she sends out signed with the wrong name before realizing the ruse Greetings – many people start mails with ‘Hello’ or ‘Hey’ – set up autocorrect to change those greetings to ‘Goodbye’ or ‘Greetings Earthlings’ Random words – you could also have autocorrect change normal words – ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘today’, ‘Wednesday’ – to other words/phrases that wouldn’t make any sense – ‘dog’, ‘Russia’, ‘the 4 th ring of Saturn is blue!’ Keep in mind that not everyone will find this funny, and you should never make autocorrect changes that could get anyone in trouble. Also, be sure to keep a list of the changes you make, this way you can undo them tomorrow. Let us know how your pranks go in the comments! Tom O’Neill Outlook Program Manager

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April fool’s: Automatic Misspellings