It's that time of year again--time to adjust your clocks for Daylight Savings time. If the computer time zone settings are correct, Outlook will handle daylight savings time changes without a problem. Problems arise when users discover the time zone settings are incorrect and adjust them, causing appointments to be at the wrong time.

Because Outlook uses UTC time when creating appointments and adjusts the start time based on your computer's time zone settings, when your colleagues in London invite you to an online meeting Outlook adds the meeting to your calendar at the correct start time for your time zone. It's a wonderful feature and it works great, most of the time. However, when you change the time zone settings after creating appointments, Outlook adjusts the appointment time to reflect the new time zone, leaving you with a lot of incorrect appointment times.

It's not difficult to fix these errors, set the computer clock so the appointment times are correct then export the appointments to an Excel or text file. Create a new calendar folder and move the existing items to it for backup. Change the computer's clock so it's using the correct time settings then import the appointments that were exported earlier. The times should be correct. Delete the calendar folder containing the old appointments when you are satisfied you aren't missing data.

Travelers have a different problem with Outlook and time zones. When they change the time zone on their laptop to use the local time zone, the start times are changed. While you can't create appointments for an absolute time: "no matter what time zone I'm in, this appointment will be at 9 AM", Outlook has a feature that makes it easier to work with two time zones--dual time display on your calendar. Set Outlook to use a secondary time zone and you'll see two time scales on the left side of the calendar. You can even swap time zones from within Outlook. Note that swapping time zones (or making any time zone changes) in Outlook will change the time zone system wide too. Look for this option in Tools, Options, Preferences, Calendar settings, Time zone.

By default, Exchange server is configured not to send Out of Office replies to the Internet. There are number of good reasons why you wouldn't want to send OOFs to the Internet, including it's a security hazard, especially when the OOF is too detailed, it responds to all messages, including spam, verifying the address is valid, or over concern that OOFs will cause mail loops. While mail loops can happen, it's rare since Exchange sends just one OOF per address during each session.

To enable Out of Office replies on Exchange 2000/2003, look at Global Settings, Internet Message Formats, Default, Properties, Advanced Tab. Check the box to allow Out of Office replies. By default, OOFs are not allowed to go out to the Internet and this box is unchecked.

There were a lot of issues with the Office 97 and using Word as the editor was frowned on and actively discouraged, with good reason. There were problems with the implementation of the Wordmail feature and it was a slow resource hog. Things improved somewhat with the release of Office 2000, but the improvements were not enough to encourage wide use of Word to edit e-mail.

A lot changed by the time Office XP was released. Instead of using email.dot as the e-mail template, they used the normal.dot template for e-mail, improving stability and performance. Additional improvements in Office 2003 eliminated many of the excuses people give for not using Word as the editor. Yes, using Word as your e-mail editor uses some resources, but the editing features gained by using Word for your editor more than outweighs the extra resources it requires. Unfortunately, too many people still remember how horrible Wordmail was back in Office 97 and make recommendations about using it in the current versions of Office based on their experience with Office 97.

If you're using Office XP or Office 2003 and haven't tried using Word to compose your e-mail, you really should give it two weeks. Chances are you'll be sold on the combination.

MAPILab's Alexandr Gorlac tested the updated filter and pronounced it "nothing new". While the weights changed slightly, the algorithms remained the same.

My experience with the new filter is that it's catching more bulk mail, such as newsletters and advertising, than the December update and is more in line with the false positive rate in the original filter. I'm most concerned about false positives, because it means I can't enable the option to permanently delete junk e-mail. While spam in my Inbox is annoying, it takes a split second to press the Del key for the few that get past the SMTP filer--it takes much longer to look in the junk folder for messages I don't consider spam. For this reason, I liked the December update much better.

Description of the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter Update: March 23, 2004

To read more about Alexandr's analysis of the recent update, see
http://blogs.officezealot.com/gorlach/archives/000506.html.