Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of the public Beta of Microsoft Office 2010! Betas for Office 2010, as well as SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 are available for download at www.microsoft.com/2010 . This is an exciting and significant milestone for both the Office and Outlook teams, because it means that for the first time, anyone can download Office 2010 ! You can learn more about the complete release of the Office 2010 beta on our Office blog . The Outlook team...

We've got good news for those of you who read your Windows Live Hotmail accounts in Outlook. We have released an update to the Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector. This update brings a number of fixes and is required to continue using Hotmail accounts in Outlook. The version number for the updated Hotmail Connector is 14.0.5139.5001. To determine which version is installed on your computer, see the end of this article. Here is an overview of changes in this update: Several send/receive issues are...

When Outlook doesn’t shutdown cleanly, your Outlook Data File (either a .pst or .ost file) can be left in an unverified state that can cause one of the following errors to appear the next time you boot Outlook: “Outlook cannot open the data file filename until it has been checked for problems.” “Microsoft Office Outlook’ exited without properly closing your Outlook data file ‘ drive :\Users\ username \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost’. ‘Microsoft...

As much as we love adding new features to Outlook, for the maintainability of our product we sometimes need to remove those that are out of date and aren't utilized by a large number of users. This allows us to focus on improving the Outlook features that most of you, our customers, rely on. The following are some features that we've removed from Outlook 2013, and we want to make sure you are aware so there aren't any surprises when you go to use or deploy the new version. Exchange "Classic Offline...

A common problem with email searches is that they can return too many results. For example, entering someone’s name may return matches where the name appears in parts of the message’s body even though you meant to look for messages from that person. It can be also hard to enter other criteria to help narrow your search, such as whether it has an attachment or that it has a particular category applied. Wouldn’t it be great if you could specify these parameters easily and get a better set of results - finding what you want even faster? Outlook 2010 makes it easy!

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Hello Office 2010 beta users! My name is Michael Affronti and I'm a Program Manager on the Outlook product team here in Redmond. We now have the opportunity to talk with all of you about Outlook 2010 and the amazing features we've been hard at work on over the last two years! Over the next couple months we'll be revealing a bunch of the changes and updates in Outlook 2010 right here on the Outlook Team Blog. Let's start with your Inbox in Outlook 2010. For a long, long time your Inbox has been a...

Outlook is the premier communications tool to stay connected with colleagues, friends, and family. Your email messages, even from multiple accounts, are in one place. Connections and communication also happen on websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live. Through these sites, you find new contacts and reconnect with old ones. You can share who you are, what you think, what you are doing, and what you like or don’t like. So, it makes sense that you can now add your friends...

Hello Outlook 2010 Beta users! We have heard from some of you that you are running into an issue with large e-mail message sizes in the Outlook 2010 Beta. We want to update you on the status of this issue. There is a known bug in the Outlook 2010 Beta where the usage of number and bullet lists causes redundant CSS definitions to be included in each outgoing message. The outgoing message might not display correctly in a mail service where there is a limit to message size, such as Gmail, BlackBerry...

  We’re happy to announce the Beta release of Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 (previously called Outlook Connector) in parallel with the Outlook 2010 Beta. Why use the Outlook Hotmail Connector? If you have been using Outlook Connector 12.1, you already know you can manage your Windows Live Hotmail e-mail, calendar, and contacts from within Outlook. Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 Beta is compatible with Outlook 2003 and 2007, and will replace Outlook Connector 12.1 upon release and...

We are excited to announce the Outlook Social Connector! The Outlook Social Connector is a set of new features to help keep track of your friends and colleagues while enabling you to grow your professional network. The Outlook Social Connector is available now as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta. The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) brings social views of your colleagues and friends right to your Inbox. As you read your e-mail messages, glance down at the new People Pane to see the picture, name...