Outlook and Exchange 2010 – The Next Wave

The Outlook team would like to congratulate our friends in Exchange for announcing the Beta 1 availability of Exchange 2010, which together with Office 2010 represents the next wave in the Microsoft Office product family!

This next wave of Office-related products will enable you to be more productive across the PC, phone, and browser. Outlook 2010, together with Exchange, will continue to improve productivity with the ultimate inbox experience, through innovative end-user technologies such as:

  • MailTips – Warn users before they commit an e-mail faux pas such as sending mail to large distribution groups, to recipients who are out of the office or to recipients outside the organization, helping protect against information leaks and reducing unnecessary e-mail messages.
  • Conversations Management – Not only will Outlook 2010 provide the ability to view, sort, and categorize emails as conversations – using tools like Clean Up and Ignore, people can simply combine related messages to reduce inbox clutter or ignore irrelevant e-mail conversations altogether.
  • Familiar Outlook Experiences on Web & Mobile – Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile will provide powerful experiences to Outlook users in web browsers and on Windows Mobile devices to complement Outlook 2010. Key features and experiences around conversations view, search, and connecting with people will be delivered to you on the go, geared specifically for a web browser or a Windows Mobile phone to keep the experience lightweight and fast.

Outlook 2010 represents the latest in our work to creating a powerful and intuitive e-mail client, providing you with a rich set of e-mail management tools to manage your personal and professional life while staying in touch with the people that matter most. New innovations in user interface, search, and people photos are just some of the bold, exciting experiences that await Outlook 2010 users. In this next wave, Outlook will make accessing your e-mail and connecting with people wherever you are – on whatever device you choose – seamless and easier than ever before.

Outlook 2010, along with the rest of the Office 2010 client, will be available for trial in an upcoming technical preview which is slated for Q3 of the 2009 calendar year. This technical preview is meant for people used to testing out software in its initial development stage, and will be followed by a broad public beta, where millions can download and try out Office 2010.

We hope you’re excited and ready to join us again as we continue in this journey towards shipping the next great release of Outlook!

The Outlook Team

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  • I have been playing with Exchange 2010 beta all weekend! Setup two accounts in the Management console and kept emailing my self back and forth to see the new threaded message capabilities along with the new OWA, really lovely. Definitely looking to get my hands on the beta when it arrives. I recently blogged about a leak of what appears to be an Outlook 2010 screenshot on my blog, I like the slickness of the UI too, really looks like a product out of the next decade. :) I never thought the Fluent UI had purpose in Outlook, but it looks like you have proven me wrong. New User Experience Improvements coming in Office 2010

  • The conversations management is definitely going to be a plus for Outlook. Sometimes we have a few conversations going on between a client for a specific issue and this will tremendously help managing our emails

  • So - will this mean the full outlook experience will also be provided to Firefox users, or will I still have to have that as my IE homepage?

  • Probably too late for 2010. Can we have a no-attachment warning. Nearly 30 years using email and I still forget them sometimes. There could be an option that, if switched on, scans the email at send time for a charatcer-string specified by the user (such as "att"). If it's present, the user gets a message "do you want to attach a document to this email?" As I get older the problem will no doubt get worse!

  • Hi Ron,

    Thanks for your feedback. Specifically for the issue you mention I would like to point you to the Forgotten Attachment Detector add-in, a grassroots project recently released by Microsoft Office Labs. When you send an email FAD checks it for keywords that indicate you’ve forgotten to attach an attachment. If it detects this, it notifies you and gives you a chance to correct any mistakes. On top of that it also checks if you’re about to send a message without a Subject and prompts you if you do. While you’re at it I invite you to explore the site and check out all the other Office related projects we have out there – we are very excited about this new initiative and invite everyone to try it out.

  • I used ACT! for 17 years before standardizing on Outlook and I currently use Office 07. The earlier version of ACT! was a great product, but the e-mail centric abilities of Outlook is something that other products can't match for the price. I can't do BCM because it doesn't tie completely into Exchange. My experience with the functionality of BCM was great, but the separate SQL database was unacceptable. .My goal is to "go with the flow" in corporate America by exploiting all features of Outlook's contact management, the 144 existing fields, custom forms, the journal, layouts, etc. If you provided more BCM functionality in Outlook while making it 100% compatible with Exchange (not a separate database), you would make us so much happier. In addition, the lack of compatibility between Word and Publisher have me concerned about your insistence on using the Word engine in Exchange instead of a product that truly is fluent in standards based HTML. That I can create a Publisher document and can't "Save As" into a Word document, nor open it with Word frustrates the heck out of me. Word shouldn't be the only editor for Outlook if it isn't HTML or Publisher compatible. I am a 29 year sales professional in high tech that would like to more actively participate in beta/forums towards the goal of having a more useful and ubiquitous tool.

  • The people photos feature looks great. How do I enable this?

  • Is there an Accouting/Payroll/HR software that easily intergrates with BCM for Outlook 2010?

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