CyberLogic Blog

Outlook 2010 is Microsoft’s latest email client offering and, like all of their upgrades, it offers various new features.  As any IT support person knows, end-users are often scared of new software because it looks different, but the new features are easy to learn and they will make your life in Outlook a lot easier. 

Here are some of the new features that I have found to be the most useful:

1. Office 2010 includes the Ribbon interface; this was first introduced in other Office 2007 applications. It organizes common functions together on one ribbon and it makes navigating through the menus much easier than previous versions of Outlook. It also includes Quick Steps, which are a series of buttons that you can configure to perform custom actions that you frequently take, such as creating a button to start a new email message for your team, or a button to archive an entire conversation in one click.
2. Outlook 2010 also introduced new threaded views for managing conversations so that they do not clutter your mailbox. You can combine and collapse conversations so that they are not scattered among other inbox items and you can include your own sent items so that you can see the whole conversation.
3. While older versions of Outlook allowed you to connect to multiple mailboxes in the same Exchange organisation, Outlook 2010 allows you to connect to mailboxes in different Exchange organisations. This is very useful for administrators and consultants who need to access different mail systems throughout the day.
4. To comply with the much larger mailbox sizes that Exchange 2007 and 2010 offer, you can now also have much larger cache files in Outlook 2010. Previous version of Outlook could support cache files of up to 2GB without risking corruption. Outlook 2010 can safely support up to 20GB cache files, which is great especially for mobile users.
5. Outlook 2010 also introduced Mail Tips; this is sort of a warning system within Outlook. This can range from warning you about large attachments to sending to a large distribution list, e.g. sending a joke to the whole company when it was only meant for your department. It can also warn you when you are about to send a mail to internal and external users – thus reducing the risk of information leakage. Users aren’t always aware of the consequences of sending certain emails and Mail Tips can help to guide them in the right direction.

These are just a few of the new features, but as you use Outlook 2010 more often, you will quickly discover that a lot of thought has gone into the development of these new features and they will certainly make your email experience a better one.