Calendaring Changes In Outlook 2007
With over half of the corporate world using Microsoft Outlook for email, it's a given that most will also manage their calendars and To Do items therein. With the release of Outlook 2007, Marc Orchant, author of The Unofficial Guide to Outlook 2007 (Wiley, published April 2007), makes a convincing case as to why that's a good choice.
"Outlook 2003 was all about increasing the usability of email- smart folders, better search, and more," says Orchant. "With Outlook 2007, there wasn't much additional room for email innovation. So Microsoft put its efforts into significantly ramping up the time and task management capabilities in Outlook."
Orchant believes by far the biggest improvement in Outlook 2007 is the To Do bar, which replaces the task pad from earlier versions of Outlook. It is different because whereas earlier versions only permitted the viewing of To Do items in certain views, now it is global throughout the interface. "The To Do bar is very customizable, enabling users to choose what they show on it and also enabling it to be docked to the side of the screen (or alternatively minimized or hidden), while users get on with their work," explains Orchant. "It can be set to show calendar entries, To Do items, and a date navigator, plus depending on the size of the screen available to the user, the number of items showing can be increased or decreased to please."
The second key change for Orchant is the threading of multiple calendars into one overall view of the user's current and pending commitments. "If people have SharePoint team sites in their environments, often they include calendars of team events and meetings," notes Orchant. "Outlook 2007 enables people to overlay SharePoint calendar information with their Outlook calendar, thus removing the need to manually reconcile two or three different calendars." While Outlook 2003 also enabled users to subscribe to SharePoint calendars, they were shown side- by-side, not threaded. So if a user is involved in five different SharePoint sites with team calendars, he'd have difficulty in keeping track.
The integration between Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007 is an incredible productivity boost for people who spend many hours in meetings and at conferences. Orchant says that now when he adds an item to his calendar, he clicks a button, which creates a pre-populated meeting notes page in a OneNote 2007 notebook. During the meeting or conference session he can take notes inside the rich editing environment of OneNote (additionally so if the user happens to have a Tablet PC), yet still have a single click reference to those from the calendar entry in Outlook. "The coolest thing is that the linkage between the calendar event in Outlook and the meeting notes in OneNote is persistent," raves Orchant. "Even if the user moves the page within the OneNote notebook, or shifts it between multiple OneNote notebooks".
Finally, Orchant notes that Microsoft has extended the labels of Outlook 2003 to every item in Outlook 2007. Previously, colorcoding was limited only to calendar items, but now the Color Categories in Outlook 2007 applies equally to email messages, notes, To Do items, and contacts. One way to use the color-coding capabilities is to organize one's digital life into separate roles- e.g., blue for all business related items, red for personal, green for travel. Alternatively, users can use different colors for the discrete projects they are involved with, and because the color-coding goes across everything in Outlook, users are quickly able to visually differentiate between projects.
Does Orchant recommend the upgrade to Outlook 2007? "Absolutely," he says. "Now that I've used Outlook 2007 for over a year, both in beta and now in production mode, I find earlier versions unusable. The new version is highly productive."