Review by Tracy Rowan

A year or so ago, I switched to Outlook, and while I can’t say that I really liked it, I did find that it was an improvement over my old email program in a couple of important ways. It offered integrated address book, and calendar functions, and it didn’t crash every fifteen minutes. I got used to its drawbacks because it offered me greater functionality.

Along comes Outlook 2007 with the contact manager, and suddenly there’s a whole new level of functionality to make me even happier. Now I can sync my Outlook calendar with my Google calendar, import RSS feeds and, with a tiny app and a couple of keystrokes, I can import contact information quickly from any online resource.

On the downside, and predictably, it takes forever to install. Backup of everything except archived mail is sort of a pain, and the way it creates files is kind of squirrely. But in general I’d say that it’s made keeping track of my life just a bit simpler. And that’s worth a lot to me.