Exchange Messaging Outlook
|
|
|
Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 8, No. 5, 25 Jun 2003, of Exchange Messaging Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook. Today's highlights:
Regular features:
Organize your Outlook mail Outlook 2003 offers some very cool new tools for organizing your email, but since many people won't see that version for months - if ever - I thought it might be useful to review some of the mail management tools already built into current versions. We'll start with the Organize pane, then look at other built-in features. Because the toolbar in Outlook 2000 and 2002 contains an Organize button, for some people this may be the first and only organizing tool they use. The Organize tool's main functions are to create Rules Wizard rules and automatic formatting rules for Outlook views without the need for the user to really understand either of those features. For example, if you click Organize, and then select Using Folders, Organize offers two choices: You can move the currently selected message to a particular folder manually or you can create a rule based on the sender or recipient's email address to move the mail to a folder automatically. This type of rule works very well to organize mail sent to particular email discussion lists, for example. Under Using Colors, again there are two choices. The second one, Show messages sent only to me in a color, won't work consistently if you have more than one email account in your profile, so I don't recommend it. The first choice is more useful; it allows you to automatically show messages sent to or from a particular person in a specific color in your Inbox. The third option in the Organize tool, Using Views, merely duplicates the list of views already available on the View | Current View menu. The fourth option, Junk E-mail, helps you make either a Rules Wizard rule or an automatic formatting rule for the messages that Outlook's built-in junk mail filter identifies as "junk" or "adult content." Since the built-in filter doesn't work that well in the first place, you are probably already running (or should be running) a separate anti-spam filter, so you can skip this feature. Organize: Use Rules Wizard If you want to change the rules that the Organize tool creates or experiment with your own, choose Tools | Rules Wizard, and follow the on-screen prompts. The Rules Wizard is largely self-explanatory, but we can offer a few tips to help you use it better:
Organize: Use automatic formatting Perhaps you want to tweak the automatic formatting generated by your choices in the Organize tool or feel you have graduated from Organize and want to create automatic formatting rules on your own. To reach those settings for the currently displayed view, choose View | Current View | Customize Current View | Automatic Formatting. A message folder will have several built-in formatting rules you can edit to control the appearance of unread, unsent, expired, and overdue messages. You can also click Add to create a new rule, specifying the condition - similar to the Rules Wizard conditions - and the formatting you want to apply. Automatic formatting works, by the way, on a table or card view of any Outlook folder. However, for day/week/month views, it works on only on calendar folders and only in Outlook 2002. Instead of the 16 colors available in a table-view rule, you can use the 10 color labels defined for the current calendar folder. For example, I have an automatic formatting rule on my default Calendar folder to show any appointment with the word "birthday" in the subject with the lavender Birthday color label. A second rule marks any appointment with the category "Holiday" also with the Birthday color label. Organize: Use categories One of the best ways to organize your mail is by category. If you give your categories names that reflect the priority of each category, you can group your Inbox by category to get a prioritized list of mail that needs action. You can apply a new category to selected messages by right-clicking and choosing Categories. A more powerful method is to use Rules Wizard rules to assign categories as new messages arrive, generally by sender. For example, you might assign one category to mail from members of your immediate family and a different one to those messages from your boss. Kaitlin Duck Sherwood explained this concept in detail in her book "Overcome Email Overload with Outlook 2000 and 2002" and in earlier EMO issues; you can read her tips at http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/usertips.htm. Fall Exchange conference planned No, it's not MEC. With no fall Exchange conference planned by Microsoft, which consolidated Exchange content into the annual TechEd conference held earlier this month, Tech Conferences, Inc. has decided to hold an Exchange conference concurrent with its Windows & .NET Magazine Connections meeting Nov. 2-6, at the Hyatt Grand Cypress in Orlando. I'm planning to be there, giving presentations on Outlook. So, I'm wondering, what aspects of Outlook 2000 and 2002 are most puzzling or challenging to you? What do you want to know about Outlook 2003, even though your deployment may be months away? If you'd like to see a particular topic covered at the November conference, use this mailto link to drop me a line ASAP: mailto:exconn@slipstick.com . Office 2003 Beta 2 Refresh update Technical beta testers of Office 2003 have begun downloading the Beta 2 Refresh (B2R), but it's not available yet for those who ordered the Beta 2 CD kit. We expect to see it any day now, probably at the http://office.microsoft.com site. In the meantime, if you want to test the Beta 2 Refresh but don't have Beta 2 yet, you should go ahead and order the Beta 2 kit from http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/orderbeta.asp now. One of the features worth looking at in B2R is the email tracking in Business Contact Manager (BCM), the new COM add-in for Outlook. It keeps track of all email messages sent to or received from a business contact, keeping the message body in the database even if the original message has been deleted. FYI, if you have been using BCM and plan to install the B2R version, make sure you export your Accounts and Business Contacts first, so you can import them after you install the refresh. This new version changes the database format and can't show the data collected in the original Beta 2 version. (Remember this is *beta* software, folks -- use at your own risk.) You may be able to get at the old data, however, by connecting Microsoft Access to the MSDE database that BCM uses and creating linked tables. Other pleasant additions include refinements to Outlook's new and more robust junk mail filter: You can right-click a message and add not just the sender's address to your list of "safe senders," but also the sender's entire domain. The Junk E-mail folder also now comes with an Empty command on the right-click context menu that permanently deletes all the items in that folder. |
|||
 |
|
||
New Utilities |
ADVANCED EMAIL TRACKER http://postofficer.com/aet/index.htm Add-in for Outlook 2000 and later to add new tracking options -- automatic read receipt , manual read receipt, and server-based message retrieval. CONCEPT MANAGER FOR POWER TOOLS SALESFORCE.COM MICROSOFT OUTLOOK EDITION TEAMPLATE WYNCS |
||
|
|
|||
Updated utilities |
CONTACTGENIE IMPORTER http://www.contactgenie.com/ Version 1.2.20 of this import tool for Outlook contacts adds support for importing from Access queries or linked tables. FOOTPRINTS FOR EXCHANGE OUTLOOK YEAR VIEW CONTROL SECURIQ SUITE SMARTDL |
||
|
|
|||
Other resources |
ADM UPDATE TO PERMIT THE CACHING OF INCOMING SMTP MESSAGES AS
IPM.NOTE http://support.microsoft.com/?id=817809 Exchange 2000 hotfix that restores the Exchange 5.x behavior of have messages mailed to public folders stored with the IPM.Note message class, rather than IPM.Post. (This issue is described in more detail at http://support.microsoft.com/?id=292484. Adds a new registry value. Slipstick.com visitor Dave Mills identified an error in the article: The new registry value that you need to add is not Incoming, but Incoming Defaults To IPM.Note. Dave also said that he needed to restart the Exchange store to make the change take effect. CHANGING THE DISPLAY ORDER IN THE EXCHANGE 2000 ADDRESS LIST TO PRINT AN EXCHANGE 5.5 DISTRIBUTION LIST XL2002 HOW TO SEND A RANGE OF CELLS USING VBA New code samples at http://www.outlookcode.com:
|
||
|
|
|||
More Information |
ISSN 1523-7990 |
||
Updated Jul 30 2006
|
|||
|
Home
| What's New | Exchange
Server | Outlook | Utilities
| Bookstore |
|||