This email application orders itself

Sep 23 2010 by David Coxon, The Journal

LOVE it or hate it, Microsoft's Outlook is the standard email and calendaring application in many organisations.

I recently installed the latest offering from the software giant to see if it could help me increase my productivity or provide me with new business solutions.

I was pleasantly surprised by what I found, there were both shiny new interfaces and some hidden gems.

New features included things like conversation grouping, enhanced attachment preview, improved scheduling and my favourite social connectors.

Due to its very nature email tends to bounce back and forth as we play ‘e-mail tennis’, quickly filling up your inbox and making it hard to follow entire conversations. Grouping emails into conversations makes a lot of sense, it makes it easier to follow conversations and it keeps your inbox cleaner.

The ‘Clean Up’ and ‘Ignore’ options, enhance this still further, giving users the option to remove a conversation altogether, remove older elements of a conversation, or ignore future emails relating to a conversation.

While the ‘Social Connector’ is a major new feature it is also a bit of a buried treasure, in that you have to download additional add-ins to get it to work.

What it does, is links people in your email system with their identities on your social networks, dragging their profile pictures and status updates over to Outlook.

When you receive an email in addition to the normal list of email addresses in the ‘from and to’ fields, you will get a picture of the person from their social network profile.

You’ll also see their most recent status updates and a list of any meetings you have had with that person and any previous email conversations.

This obviously saves a lot of time digging around finding this information manually, but it also has its dangers, blurring the distinction between work life and personal life.

Another timesaver is the ability to preview attachments within email, without having to open additional software applications.

This may seem quite a small thing, but it does save a lot of time.

For many of us our email system is one of our most essential business tools, yet it is also one of the most commonly overlooked.

What I found with the new version of Outlook was that it saved me time on repetitive tasks, giving me time to concentrate on a creating a better quality of communication.

:: David Coxon, ICT manager, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art