Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Interested in a Sneak Peek at Office 2010??


At the Scobleizer site, there's a bunch of new videos of discussions with the Office 2010 Team Product Manager. Outlook is going to be very interesting -- here are the major points from the video:

Quick Steps: If you have processes that you repeat over and over, you can put them on a button. For example, you work for a marketing company and people ask the same question repeatedly (of course they didn't go to the FAQ page!!). You can set up a Quick Step that, when clicked, will file the incoming mail into a folder of your choice and simultaneously generate a canned response to the sender with the requested information.

Conversation View: If you have an e-mail conversation that goes on and on, you can see it in a true threaded view. You can also see where conversations fork within the view. In addition, there's an option called Clean Up that will remove any redundant messages from the thread. For example, if Terry said some things and Pat responded with Terry's entire message encapsulated, then the message from Terry would be moved to the Deleted Items folder because the information was already contained in Pat's message. In the demo, the thread message count was reduced from about 12 messages to only 5. By the way, the threaded view will not only show items from your Inbox, but also items from your Sent Items folder so you get a complete picture of the conversation.

Ignore Threads: I hate it when I get copied on something with a bunch of other people and then get a bunch of Reply All's from some of the people that say "Stop sending me this info" or "Remove me from this message." Now there's a function called Ignore Thread that when chosen, will automatically move all future incoming messages for a selected thread to the Deleted Items folder.

Calendar View in E-Mail: If you receive a calendar invite, you can actually see your calendar around the invite's timeframe in a window embedded inside the invite. You don't have to switch to your calendar and find the date and time to view your availability. Sweet!

Calendar Groups: This is a way to add people to a group so that you can quickly display the calendars of everyone in the group. For example, suppose you want to set up a meeting with the folks that work for you. You can set up a calendar group that, when clicked, will show you their calendars compared to yours, and you can see where there are holes in the overall schedule. Seems much faster than the current Outlook method!

To see more, check them out at http://tinyurl.com/kvpokp. Enjoy!

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