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A few weeks ago, I posted about the new contact card in Outlook 2010 and how useful it is when you want to find out more about someone in your organization. Perhaps even more useful is the way that the contact card enables you to contact people quickly from Outlook.
In order to use these features your organization must be using an instant messaging client that integrates with Outlook using the Microsoft Office 2010 Presence Integration API.
You may remember Jed from my first contact card post. After helping Jed with some design research, we worked together on a few new prototypes for his project. Earlier today Jed sent me the final prototypes that he was sharing with his team’s management at a design meeting. I looked at the designs and found a few serious issues I wanted to correct before Jed’s presentation. However, his meeting was less than an hour away! Because of the short amount of time to make changes I decided it would be best to use IM to tell Jed.
I saw his name at the top of the email message and noticed his status was green, indicating he was available. Hovering over Jed’s name opened the contact hover card. I clicked the chat icon to start an IM chat.
After a minute or so I hadn’t received a response, which means Jed probably wasn’t looking at his computer screen. Going back to the email I hovered on his name again and this time chose to call him using Office Communicator which uses the speakers and microphone on my computer. Jed answered and I was able to share the problems that I had caught in the designs so he could incorporate changes before presenting the prototype to his group’s managers.
In today’s workplace we often need to move seamlessly between communication modalities like email, IM, and phone. When you combine the Outlook 2010 Inbox with the power of an IM and voice client that uses our presence APIs for seamless integration you can always choose the right way to communicate. The next time an email conversation drags on over an endless argument try switching to a real-time communication. With Office Communicator you can have a video call or share your screen so other people see what you see.
Comments: (10) Collapse
That could be a life saver.
Can Contact card be extended? Is there API support for it?
This looks great. However, I have a fresh install of Outlook 2010 on both Windows XP & Vista machines and everytime either computer hovers over the contact card the software crashes and restarts. It is repeatable on both machines. How can we troubleshoot this?
We are having the same issue with Outlook 2010 crashing when you hover over an email address (typically when replying to an email)and the contact card comes up. This is a Windows XP machine with a new install of Office 2010. Is there a known fix for this?
Same issue here with 4 new Dell Laptops and Office 2010. The hovering aspect causes Outlook to crash. We do not use an Instant Messaging program. This hovering is causing a restart many times during the day.
I love Contact Cards but unfortunately they don't seem to present enough information such as address, city, state and country so I always ended up going back to the main GAL again and again. I really missed the older double-click on the name method. It took a while to find out that the way to get that was to go to the icon and click on Outlook Properties. However this is much more cumbersome than before with more clicks and more precise mouse control required. In future Outlook versions, could Outlook Properties be added to the name right-click menu in addition to the Outlook Contacts since this seems more intuitive (to me anyway;tomato tomaato)? Alternatively, you could add this critical "who is this person" information to the next version of Contact Cards.
I was able to replace the Location line with the City entry from the GAL thanks to the excellent directions at support.microsoft.com/.../981022 since that line always shows up as blank for me. My company does not use Office Communicator and has not yet integrated Webex Connect using the API. I can change it back easily if it does start and people don't just use "Office" as their location. With City information, I can get a good idea of the person's role. Thanks for the configurability in Contact Cards. You may wish to consider filling the Location line with City data if the Location data returned is unpopulated.
Same problem here on all computers with Outlook 2010, hovering over a user crashes Outlook; but only with internal users...???
"Same problem here on all computers with Outlook 2010, hovering over a user crashes Outlook; but only with internal users" Same here, anyone know how to fix?
Have opened a case with Microsoft will let you know if I find a solution. Can you confirm this is only with internal users? Looks like an issue with AD??
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