Review by Michael J. Tresca

I was new to Vista when I received my new laptop, so I wasn’t aware of the changing software landscape that seems to be a hallmark of Microsoft products. Although I did get the Microsoft Office Suite, it now excludes Outlook. This made me very, very angry.

When the opportunity to review this latest incarnation of Outlook came along, I jumped at it, because life post-Outlook is pretty awful. And, now that I’m back in the warm bosom of Microsoft’s email program, I can breathe a sigh of relief.

This is the same Outlook you either love or hate. The programs still seem to be developed independently of each other. There’s also junk email scanning which is semi-useful if you don’t have spam blocking on your server side. The Reading Pane is omnipresent but removable and there’s this irritating tendency to group messages into, well, groups, as if the entire world thought that would be a good idea for message sorting. News flash: It isn’t. Fortunately, it can be turned off.

The calendar is the same as other Outlook calendars, only a little more graphically appealing. You still cannot easily import data from one of the Outlook programs to the other; dragging and dropping emails preserves body and header. Similarly, you can drag an email to your contacts, but that only drops the email name into the contacts list and dumps the entire body into Notes field. In other words, there’s no smart way to navigate content between the various sub-programs within Outlook. This is something that’s sorely needed. The electronic signature at the bottom of emails is becoming the de facto business card, and it’d be nice if we could just import that content right into Contacts. But alas, Outlook’s not about to be THAT innovative.

The other new thing that hangs around, waiting for you to notice it, is the To-Do Bar. As if navigating the myriad of Outlook programs who don’t really like each other wasn’t difficult enough, you are now expected to navigate sideways. From a space perspective, this makes sense; there’s more real estate on the horizontal axis of most monitors. But it is counterintuitive to the rest of the Outlook design, which is top to bottom. The To-Do Bar is basically what used to happen when you clicked on your name in older versions of Outlook: it summarizes all your relevant information in one place. The problem is that it won’t go away easily. It eventually goes away if you can figure out how to ask it nicely. But apparently each application is treated like its own entity, so removing the To-Do Bar from say, email, means it still shows up when you’re in Tasks.

Finally there’s what’s new in this version of Outlook, the Business Contact Manager. It requires SQL server. This is most useful if you’re running a business, and contains everything from projects to accounts, billable hours to marketing campaigns. It’s of particular use to freelancers and hourly consultants; as a consultant myself once, I ended up using the journal to clock my progress, but the BCM can do it better. Being the new kid on the block, BCM is better integrated with all the other programs.

At times, Outlook’s various programs seem like squabbling in-laws at a wedding…related and not happy about it. If you can look past that - and if you’re a seasoned Outlook user, chances are you’re used to it - then this is definitely worth the investment.