Thoughts on Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 beta 2 is much better than previous builds I’ve tested. I’ve been putting the To Do section through its’ paces today and I have to tell you it is becoming my favorite new feature. What I really like is that I can flag emails as “To Do” items and they show up with my Tasks in the same list. I can sort that To Do list by Categories and get a more complete view of my list of items to accomplish. For my categories, I’ve created each client and project as a category. Categories could be greatly improved by allowing sub-categories. Right now, if I have multiple projects for one client, I create my categories as “Customer – Project 1”, “Customer – Project 2”

The other feature I really like is having an RSS Feed feature. It works much better and faster than previous builds. I might be tempted to give up Onfolio to have my RSS data in Outlook. The one missing feature is the ability to mark all the sub folders as read. If you subscribe to alot of feeds and have trouble staying caught up from time to time, you know how valuable a global “Mark All As Read” can be. I use that feature a lot in Onfolio ( now a part of the Live Toolbar ).

I have not done much with Inking, but I’ll give that a whirl over the next day or so.

What is missing? Newsgroup support. If you participate in Newsgroups, you’ll have to continue to use Outlook Express or Windows Mail in Vista. I’m disappointed that they chose not to offer Newsgroup support. Microsoft Entourage, the Outlook equivilent on the Mac, has newsgroup support. Why not Outlook 2007?