Exchange Messaging Outlook Volume 11, Number 17

A reader asks: "Is there a way to delete items from within the mailbox in bulk? I have a lot of items in a public folder and need to selectively delete some of the contents of the PF."
 
Define "selectively". If you need to be completely selective, you'll need to go through the folder and pick and choose. You can use custom views or run rules on the public folder to help you find the messages you want to delete, but you'll still need to browse the folder to delete the messages you no longer want to keep.
 
If you just want to delete all messages over a specific age, you can use Public folder age limits, either the default of 180 days or select an age for the folder. This method will delete the older messages as they age, resulting in a smaller and more manageable folder.  Mailbox manager will do the same for mailbox messages and can be configured to only delete larger messages over a specific age. If you aren't the Exchange administrator, you can use custom views to show only messages that arrived before a specific date, then select all and delete.

Office 2007 was released to manufacturing two weeks ago and is now available to volume licensers and MSDN subscribers, with public availability expected in January 2007.  As is typical when a new version is released, there are some reported problems - including many reports that it's slow and sluggish, especially on startup.
 
Should you upgrade? In my opinion, yes. It's not something you need to rush out and do as soon as it's made available, but Outlook 2007 offers many useful features and better security that everyone should plan to upgrade, especially those who use one of the older versions of Outlook: 97, 98, 2000, or 2002. Keep in mind that for best results, everyone in the organization needs to be using Outlook 2007.  
 
The To-Do bar, calendar overlays, and the ability to easily share calendars, without using Exchange server  or with people who don't use Outlook, makes it well worth the cost.  While you can share calendars with people who use Macs or other calendar programs, you cannot share them with people who use older versions of Outlook as they don't support importing multi-event *.ics files.
 
To avoid problems upgrading, I recommend uninstalling older versions of Office and Outlook first and rebooting. If you have problems after upgrading, your first troubleshooting step should be to make a new Outlook profile and disable any add-ins which may be installed. Disable Add-ins from Tools, Trust Center, Add-ins, Manage COM Add-ins (at the bottom of the page).

As part of Outlook 2007's improvements to Outlook's Find capabilities, there were changes made to Advanced Find. The best improvement is that it's somewhat faster now, but other changes are not as positive.  Advanced find uses the index used by Instant search, so if the Windows Desktop Search (WDS) hasn't finished building the index, you may not get any results returned, unless you build the search conditions using the Advanced tab.  When you use Windows Vista, Advanced Find doesn't work unless WDS is installed.
 
 You also can't save an Advanced Find as an Office saved search (*.oss) for later use. While you can save the find as a Search folder when searching for Messages, Office saved searches are sometimes more convenient, especially for less used searches. Since Search folders are email only, Office Saved searches were the only way to save searches for non-mail item types. Unfortunately, this is not possible in Outlook 2007.  

You can control how Outlook starts by using command line switches. While many of the switches are used only when you are having problems with Outlook, including /cleanviews  and /cleanreminders, several allow you to do things in Outlook from a command line, such as open a new form (using the /c switch) or a open new window to a specific folder (/select foldername).

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Unless otherwise noted, the following switches are also valid for older versions of Outlook and work with both Internet mail and Exchange server accounts.

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