Outlook 2007, formerly known as Outlook 12, is scheduled to be released later this year and has a number of cool new or improved features that should prove popular with users. The following is a list of my top 10 favorite Outlook 2007 features and the reasons I like them, in no particular order. Note: A future issue will cover the highlights of Exchange 12.

1. Calendar overlay

The calendar overlay allows you to combine two (or more) calendars into a single calendar for viewing. Outlook 2007 displays calendars side-by-side by default, as in Outlook 2003, or you can click on any calendar tab and overlay it on the first calendar.

This feature makes it easy for someone who manages group calendars to see everyone's schedule in one calendar, but it should prove very popular with users who keep a separate personal calendar. It eliminates the need to set private appointments to hide them from co-workers with access to your calendar, except to block off out-of-office time. It should be a boon for home users who keep separate calendars for each family member, eliminating the need to set labels for each member.

2. To-Do list

Users who want Outlook Today usefulness but didn't like Outlook Today should be very happy with the To-do bar. It displays flagged items, tasks, and appointments in a pane on the right side of Outlook - in every folder. It includes a small navigation calendar, a list of upcoming appointments and tasks (both flagged items and tasks from your task folder).

You can quickly minimize the to-do bar pane to toolbar size, docked on the right edge of Outlook, if you have limited screen real estate. The mini to-do bar shows the next appointment and number of tasks when minimized and one click pops the full to-do bar out for your review.

The to-do bar navigation calendar is identical to the navigation calendars in the calendar module - select a date or range of dates and you'll be taken to the calendar with those dates selected on the calendars you currently have displayed.

In related change, the taskpad moves to the bottom of the day and week calendar and the tasks scheduled for each day are displayed at the end of the column for the dates shown.

3. Contact pictures on Email

This feature gives you a reason to add pictures to your contacts - when you have a contact for a sender and the contact contains a picture, the contact's picture is displayed in the message header so you can "see" who sent you an email. This works in both the reading pane and on an opened message.

4. Anti-phishing and Anti-spam Enhancements

With Outlook 2007, you can print or forward messages containing blocked external content without downloading the blocked content. Outlook 2007 improves on the anti-spam and anti-phishing protections added to Outlook 2003 SP2 by adding warnings for suspicious email addresses and supporting postmarks. How well either feature helps prevent users from being taken in remains to be seen, but they certainly can't hurt.

Other often requested features, like the ability to select multiple messages and add the sender's addresses to the blocked list with one click are not in Outlook 12, and with good reason: Blocked lists are not an effective way to fight spam.

5. One Editor: Word

I know a lot of administrators and die-hards will fuss about the loss of the "Outlook editor" in Outlook 2007. All I'm going to say is "get over it!" While Word-as-the-editor got off to a rocky start in Outlook 97 and deserved every complaint aimed at it, it improved with subsequent each version and there is no reason not to use it with Outlook 2003, provided Word 2003 is installed.

The change to one editor will make it so much easier for anyone providing tech support and everyone will have the same features available to them.

My only complaint with the tight integration between Outlook and Word, is that we lose the workarounds for printing specific pages in an email. All forms and formats now use a common printer dialog, unfortunately it's Outlook's which has limited printing options, not Word's or Window's, both of which offer better printing options.

6. Collapsible Favorite folders and Navigation pane

One of the biggest complaints from Outlook 2003 users, especially those with only a few folders, is that they are not able to get rid of the Favorites folder list. This changes in Outlook 2007 - while you still can't remove it completely (short of switching to the Folder list view), you can collapse the Favorite folders section as well as the mail folder list section. You can also collapse the navigation pane to the width of a toolbar, docked on the left side of Outlook's window. When the navigation pane is collapsed and space permits, the folders on the favorite folder list are buttons, making it easy for you to access your most frequently used folders.

7. Auto configuration of email accounts

Outlook 2007 supports auto-configuration of email accounts. The user will only need to know their mail address in order to set up an account - Outlook will attempt to find the server names and configure the account for them. This will work with any type of email account if the email server is configured for auto-configuration. Because it's just a simple text file and is not "Windows-only", I expect that most domains will eventually support this feature - if for no other reason than to cut down on support calls.

Exchange 12 is required for auto-configuration of Exchange server accounts.

8. Preview attachments in the Reading Pane

This is probably my number one time saver and the feature I miss most when I use a computer with Outlook 2003 installed. Why? Because I receive a lot Word documents by email and being able to view them in the preview pane, without actually opening the attachment in a separate instance of Word, is so much faster. At this time only Office documents are supported, but other files should be supported by the time Office 2007 is released.

9. Business card views in Contacts

Finally, the ability to see your contact's photo without opening each contact. The pictures display beside the address and phone details in the Business Card view. The business card view is configurable per contact, from the size and position of the image, to the fields displayed and the background color used. You can use the background color to visually "label" contacts - for example, use red backgrounds for important business contacts and green for friends and family.

10. Color Categories

The good news: Outlook 2007 will allow more colors and labels. However, color categories is not an extension of the labels we have in Outlook 2003. As a heavy user of Quick Flags, categories and labels, I'm undecided if it complicates things more or makes it easier to use categories, but studies show few people use categories because they are too complicated hopefully this will increase their usage. I'm going to need some more time to get used to it.

So what popular requests won't be in Outlook 2007? While there is a long list of things at least one user in the world would like to see, the following requests are made frequently and date back several versions, and are not going to be in Outlook 2007.

Subtasks.

While many users, especially those who are familiar with other task management applications, want the ability to create subtasks, Microsoft's studies show tasks are underused and too complicated. They feel the addition of subtasks would reduce the usability even more. While I don't think tasks are complicated, many users don't use them because they don't see a need for them. Many times they don't know whether to create a task or an appointment, so they just use appointments for everything - this puts the 'task' on their calendar and they can see everything at a glance.

For more information on Microsoft's thoughts on subtasks, see Melissa McBeth's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/melissamacbeth/archive/2006/01/13/512780.aspx 

Travel time for Appointments.

Many users want to be able to configure travel time for an appointment and have the travel time marked off as unavailable. This would allow them to set one appointment and block out time required for travel or preparation, instead of creating additional appointments to block off travel or prep time. This suggestion may make it into a future version, but it won't be in Outlook 2007.

Better Time Zone handling.

There are several different ways to make Outlook handle appointments better when working in multiple time zones, from the ability to pin an appointment to a specific time to adding a time zone selection field so an appointment can be created for the correct time in a specific time zone without a lot of thinking involved. While time zone problems real and these suggestions are good, Outlook 2007 won't handle time zone changes any differently than older versions of Outlook. Maybe next time.

End-user training and configuration for junk email

The less time users spend on dealing with spam, the more time they have for doing real work. End users tend to attack spam using methods they think are perfect, but in reality, they are useless. One example: creating blocked senders lists when spammers keep changing their address. Users also get tired of constantly configuring filters and give up. For these reasons (and more), we won't see changes in the configurability of Outlook's junk email filter.

As I mentioned earlier, the ability to select multiple messages and add the sender's addresses to the blocked list with one click is not going to be in Outlook 2007, because blocked lists are not an effective way to fight spam.

Newsgroups

This is a perennial request and will definitely not be built into Outlook 12. If you want NNTP support in Outlook, you'll need to get one of the following add-ins.

Newslook:
http://www.ghytred.com/NewsLook/about.aspx 

Newsgator (read only, requires add-in to post):
http://www.newsgator.com/home.aspx 

Mapilab NNTP for Outlook:
http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/nntp/ 

Newshound:
http://www.shorelinesoftware.com/index.htm

According to a recent press release, Office 2007 will be available later this fall. Neither the name nor the estimated availability is a surprise, as this release follows the same pattern as previous versions. As with Outlook 2003, the official name of the new version of Outlook is "Office Outlook 2007", which everyone, except authors, will shorten to "Outlook 2007".

There are going to be seven different Office suites to choose from and each application will be available separately. While pricing on both suites and individuals remains stable, there is some good news for non-business users: the Student and Teachers version is being replaced with the Home and Student suite. While the terms of the EULA are not available yet, this indicates that Office 2007 will be available at an affordable price to everyone for non-commercial use. (Note that the Home and Student version does not include Outlook.)

For the complete text of the press release, see
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/feb06/02-15OfficeMoreOptionsPR.mspx 

Licensing and Pricing documents:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2007office/default.mspx