The Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview shows that Outlook 2010 will include a number of productivity-boosting enhancements that should appeal to a wide cross-section of users, from the novice to the seasoned pro. Here are my top five productivity enhancements in Outlook 2010.

Backstage View. Personally, I think the addition of the Backstage View in Office 2010 applications sets a new level of application accessibility and usability, especially in Outlook 2010. Clicking on the Office button gives you access to Outlook settings and account information, including account settings, automatic replies to email, mailbox cleanup, and rules. Bringing all this information into one interface should be a boon to productivity, since users will no longer have to hunt around for management features in various Outlook menus.

Schedule View. Although there were different “views” of Outlook data in previous releases, the implementation meant that they weren’t that useful. However, Outlook 2010 includes better control over views, and I recommend anybody test driving it to spend some time using them. A case in point is the new Schedule view, which provides better insight into your daily schedule, as recorded in your Outlook calendar. Moreover, as with the other views, you have the option to set different time scales to provide a granular look as to what is going in your day. The new Time Scale feature enables you to scale your schedule view from 5-minute to 60-minute increments.

Task Notes. Office 2010 includes OneNote 2010 integration with the main Office applications, including Outlook. From the Outlook Tasks List, click “Task Notes” and the “Select Location in OneNote” dialog box appears. From this dialog box, you have the option of selecting a section or page for your task notes. Even if you are currently a big OneNote user, the introduction of Task Notes in Outlook 2010 may cause you to reconsider your existing OneNote organizational schema.  I see the integration of OneNote with Outlook and other Office 2010 applications as one of the highlights in this upcoming Office release.

Publish Online. The new Publish Online feature gives the promise of a geographically-dispersed project team being able to publish their personal and team calendar data online, and make it accessible to the team.  With Publish Online, you can publish your Outlook calendar to Office Online, or a WebDAV server. I like the options here because it won’t tie you to an expensive online collaboration solution.

Customize Common Tasks. There have been few (if any) changes to how you perform common Outlook tasks in quite some time. With the launch of Outlook 2010, you have the option to customize how you perform common tasks like sending meeting invites to your team, sending emails to your whole team, and forwarding emails. You also have the option to create your own “quick steps” from scratch. These options are available from “Quick Steps” in the Home ribbon or from the “Quick Steps” dialog box. The best part is that these options are dialog box-driven, with no knowledge of macros required.

Outlook 2010 and Your Productivity

While I lamented in a previous post that Outlook 2010 needs to be more social, the productivity enhancements present in Outlook 2010 offer a lot for everyone from novice to power users. My history as a writer and computer book technical reviewer on Office topics goes back to Office 2000; the Office 2010 Technical Preview — especially Outlook 2010 — show a lot more promise at this stage than previous releases, so I’m looking forward to checking out the final version.

What productivity features are you looking for in Outlook 2010?

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The iPhone does have Spotlight search already built-in, but Spotlight has a limitation. It can only search what is stored on your phone. For an email account, this means that it can only search a couple hundred messages, not the account’s entire archives. And how often is the email you are searching for one of the most recent two hundred? In my case, the answer is rarely.

reMail works by connecting to your Gmail or other IMAP-enabled email account. It downloads the entire archives of the account onto your phone, making it searchable in the app. reMail suggests leaving your phone on a WiFi connection overnight to download mail the first time. I was impressed it recognized my Google Apps email address as a Gmail account and connected to it without a problem via the app’s Gmail protocol. In my experience, other applications can’t always do that (including Google’s own). reMail currently only supports usage with one email account.

Unlike Spotlight, which only searches headers and titles, an email’s entire content is searchable in reMail. The app also allows for more advanced searches than Spotlight does. For instance, exclusion searches are possible, as well as “OR” searches, and searches limited to terms in only an email’s header or body (header:term, for instance). Auto-complete suggestions are made as you type your search.

Once an email has been located, it can be replied to or forwarded using the app’s email client.

One aspect of reMail is its greatest asset and its greatest weakness at the same time. Because the app downloads the entire archives of an email account onto the iPhone for archiving, searches are faster than using similar tools such as Gmail’s search, especially if you don’t have a 3G connection. Searches can even be done offline, when roaming, or when on an airplane, to reference material.

But at the same time, large email archives take up storage room on an iPhone that the user may wish to devote to other things. My relatively small archive of 6800 messages took up 26.9MB. reMail says that as a rule of thumb to estimate it will use 5MB of storage for every 1000 emails, which is fairly in line with my usage.

Xobni includes advanced email search as part of a suite of features that integrates search of contacts, calendar items and tasks, and integration of social media profiles with contact listings. Could this be the future of reMail on the iPhone? I’d say that’s unlikely, given Spotlight and Apple’s history of rejecting apps that duplicate functionality it already provides.

reMail is a powerful search tool. If you need to frequently search your email archives for reference material and have the storage space to devote to it, reMail might be a time-saving tool for you. But if your archives are massive it may leave you pinched for space on your iPhone.

How often do you search your email archives? Is power search capability worth giving up iPhone storage space?

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While email is still king in many organizations, it would be useful to be able to access Twitter, LinkedIn ,and even Facebook directly from Outlook.

Even though Microsoft hasn’t officially added support for social media to the next version of the app, you can customize Outlook 2007 and add social features yourself. Here is a quick overview of some add-ins that can help you make Outlook more social.

TwInbox. I’ve just started running TwInbox from TechHit to keep up with Twitter through Outlook 2007 (previously called OutTwit; Simon has written about it previously).  It has a really simple install routine. However, I do recommend you setup a new folder for tweets before you log in into TwInbox and pay attention to the options menu and specify that folder for your tweets otherwise Twinbox will flood your Outlook inbox with tweets. While Twitter clients like Twhirl are popular, web workers who live in Microsoft Outlook should appreciate this add-in’s clean integration and toolbar that makes all  Twitter commands easily accessible. My initial experience with TwInbox is favorable and I look forward to exercising more of its features. It is available as a free download.

FBLook. I was looking for an add-in to view Facebook from Outlook, because I find myself using Facebook a lot more lately. I found FBLook (also from TechHit). It  enables you to update your Facebook status directly from an Outlook toolbar. You also have the option to view your friends status updates, and view notifications of new friend requests, messages, invites and pokes. FBLook is a free download. It requires you to log in to your Facebook account via a web browser during the installation process.

LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar. If you manage your contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn offers the LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar as a free download. I give high marks to this Outlook add-in for its ease of setup and directed approach for integrating LinkedIn contact management. The Build Network wizard enables you to specify where to search in your folders and email for possible contacts. You can search for contacts you communicate with frequently, create Outlook contacts from your LinkedIn connections, and select contacts to invite from your Outlook contact list to your LinkedIn network. The dashboard is another powerful feature of this toolbar, because it publishes updates from your LinkedIn network to Outlook 2007′s main window. There are also communications reminders for keeping in touch with contacts, emails that potentially needs a reply, and follow-up reminders.

While people are always going to need the core Outlook features of email, calendar, to-do list and task management, Microsoft has yet to embrace social media as an important online communications medium. The developers behind the tools surveyed in this post have provided some valuable features I would have expected to see in the new Outlook 2010.

Share your favorite Outlook add-ins in the comments.

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Inside MissingLink Project Center

After installing MissingLink Project Center, it appears as a toolbar and menu in Outlook. It includes the following:

• MissingLink Dashboard: This is the central control panel for setting up new projects.

• Add to MissingLink: This enables you to add items to an existing project and opens the Select Project dialog box.

• Find in MissingLink: This button seems to be for a search mechanism, but in Outlook 2007 I was only greeted with an error message.
• Help for MissingLink: This tool could definitely benefit from a simple quick start guide to get users acclimated to it. There is online help, but it lacks task orientation and spends more time going over the user interface, rather than telling users how to use the add-in to manage projects.

The greatest gaffe with MissingLink Project Center is that it doesn’t take a process-oriented approach. While I am conversant with a number of project management tools, and am a longtime Outlook user, I didn’t find MissingLink Project Center very intuitive. My expectation was that it would offer more wizards and give me a more fluid system for managing projects. Post-install, much to my disappointment, I was only left with an extra toolbar.

I ran MissingLink Project Center on a Windows XP machine with Outlook 2007 and noticed in some places that the add-in breaks from Office 2007 interface standards, because it isn’t accessible from the Add-Ins ribbon, which is irritating.

MissingLink Project Center could be useful for the many non-PMs out there seeking tools to improve their project management, such as freelance workers who want to get better organized with their client work. However, to capitalize on this audience, usability is key and this add-in is just not good enough.

Final Thoughts

In the end, my hope is that future versions of the Missing Link Project Center clean up some of the add-in’s rough edges, especially its usability, and make sure that it keeps up with the interface changes present in Office 2007 and the forthcoming Office 2010. This add-in has a lot of potential, but needs to mature further. I look forward to revisiting MissingLink Project Center because it is a good idea suffering from poor execution.

Have you tried MissingLink Project Center? What did you think of its usability?

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Wait no more! Clear Context, a San Francisco-based start-up that makes an in-box management plug-in for Microsoft Outlook has come up with a new product called, Contact Exporter for Outlook. Of course you will need their inbox management plug-in, a for-pay product.

The Contact Exporter is a beta feature in ClearContext IMS v4 that lets you create and export groups of email addresses found in messages stored in the Outlook folders you select.

What it essentially does is create a list of email addresses found in messages from a set of folders users choose. And these can be used to create distribution lists. You can create say, an email list for a birthday invite and export the list in the CSV format. You can export files and import them into any application that will allow you to import CSV files. Facebook and Socialzr are two such web services. I think this export feature is quite handy. If you want to know more, check out their website.

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