New Features in Microsoft Outlook 2002

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You might want to start with these lists of interesting new features:

Email Account Configuration | Mail | Calendar | Contacts | Security | Other Features | More Information

Email Account Configuration

Outlook 2002 also overhauls the concept of synchronizing with an Exchange Server, introducing Send/Receive groups that apply not just to Exchange accounts, but to all mail accounts. Users will be able to build account groups that download headers only, headers + message bodies, or entire messages including attachments from any combination of accounts. Filtering will apply not just to Exchange accounts, but also to other mail accounts. All send/receive operations will support progress dialogs.  

If your POP/SMTP account requires you to authenticate via the POP account before sending via the SMTP address, Outlook 2002 can handle this. See:

Previous versions of Outlook would just appear to hang when an Exchange connection took a while. Outlook 2002 provides a Cancel Request dialog that gives the user a choice of waiting or canceling the operation. On slow or congested networks, this dialog may become quite annoying to users. The article OL2002 Changing Outlook Cancelable RPC Progress Dialog Behavior explains how to disable the dialog or change its behavior so that it waits longer before appearing.

Mail

Better reading and printing of plain text mail messages, with extra paragraph marks removed (but easily restored if you need them, for example to format tabular data). To turn this feature on or off, choose Tools | Options | Email Options | Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages. There is a known problem with this feature and post items. See:

Easier to switch between mail formats on the fly

Outlook 2002 adds performance improvements for WordMail (the use of Word as the e-mail editor) and makes WordMail messages smaller.

Bulk mailing via merge to Word 2002 that does not display "object model guard" prompts and allows the user to control the message format.

Also see:

Calendar

They also added lots of other calendar features:

Contacts

Security

Outlook 2002 contains security features similar to the Outlook E-mail Security Update, but with some degree of end user control.

Instead of having .exe, .mdb and other "dangerous" attachments totally blocked by Outlook, end users can downgrade security for specific file types with a registry fix. Those files will no longer be blocked, but users will have to save them to a system folder before they can run them. This is the same level of security as in Office 2000 SR-1 and the separate Attachment Security Update, and I think this is a good compromise between safety and utility -- users won't be able to open .exe file attachments directly from Outlook, but will be able to save them to a system folder and run them from there.

More good news:

Beyond the customization for file attachments available in the Windows registry, other customization rests with the administrative tools available for Exchange Server and HP OpenMail environments. The administrative control has been enhanced in several ways:

Other Features

Also see:

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