If there’s one thing that makes me angry, it’s other people not getting angry enough. Britain has swathes of so-called regulators and “watchdogs” monitoring everything from advertising, to telecoms, to the protection of our private data, and they’re all about as much use as a toaster in a bath.

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

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Online-overlord Barry Collins has been fiddling with the Office 2010 beta for the last couple of days, and his reaction to it has been terrifying. Barry greets technology in only two states: the apoplectic fury of a man for whom every hollow promise is the death knell of another dream, and the rapture of somebody who’s just discovered that Nirvana’s a theme park with a £35 admission price.

What terrifies me is that he’s greeted Office 2010 with an almighty ‘meh’. There’s been bafflement and a few half-hearted jokes, but not once has the office fallen still at the ominous ticking of the Barry bomb which sits at the core of his being.

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Completely new in Outlook 2010 Beta is the People Pane. This appears below the Reading pane in the main window and in all the individual item windows. It shows thumbnail images, one for every person (or email address) associated with the item and lets you quickly access other items which are also associated with that person/address.

The contents shown in the People Pane are derived from the Windows Search index which is kept up to date as new items are created or arrive via email. When you first install Office 2010 Beta all your existing Outlook items must be re-indexed so don’t expect the People Pane to spring to life immediately but once indexing is complete all the other emails, attachments and meetings known for a person are just a click away. Read more

There’s little doubt that Outlook is the most physically changed of all the applications: in particular, Outlook 2010 now has the Ribbon properly integrated into its interface. Here, we take a quick-fire tour of the new-look.

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Now Microsoft have released beta test versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 we can start to see what they’ve been talking about in the “co-authoring” arena. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports multiple people editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents at the same time. When you store your documents in a SharePoint document library, any number of people can open the document and they see who else is editing the document in the status bar. Your changes are bracketed with a blue line in the left margin and you get notifications when other people’s updates are available.

When you save your changes, you also get to see the other person’s changes that they have saved highlighted in green.

It seems that making small changes and saving often is the best way not to tread on each other’s toes.

In the Info section in Backstage (File | Info) you can see who is editing the document and send messages to them by email or by instant message (if you have Office Communicator). At the bottom of the Info section you can also see and manage all the different versions of the file, either autosaved or previous versions held in the SharePoint document library.

Co-authoring documents is going to be very useful for many people and it is good to see it is included in the free SharePoint Foundation 2010 and not reserved for SharePoint Server 2010 which will cost quite a lot of money.

We’ve already given a more general introduction to Microsoft Office 2010’s Backstage view, but Outlook 2010 deserves a special mention.

Above is the first screen to meet you when you click File, the Info screen. This makes it much, much easier to change settings than the horrible meandering mess that was Outlook 2007 and predecessors.

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Yesterday Adobe made the beta of its new Flash 10.1 player available for desktop testing via Adobe Labs. The fact that it’s only a point release suggests that it’s a relatively trivial update but that’s not the case. In fact 10.1 is one of the most significant releases in the history of Flash.

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This is the screen you’ll see in the Microsoft Word 2010’s Backstage view if you click on the Info tab. Think of it as a glorified version of the File Info dialog you currently access if you click Properties, but with a much nicer layout and more power – including the ability to recover unsaved items.

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Microsoft Word has long offered artistic effects to add to your headings, but we welcome the new Text Effects as they make them easier to apply and also don’t convert them into some fancy graphical format – which means you can search on the words, just as with any text within your document.

The effects themselves won’t have Adobe Illustrator users fainting in awe, but they’re strong enough to add a bit of impact to newsletters or even the funkier company report. As ever, use sparingly.

This is one of those features I just happen to like: the ability to insert a screenshot quickly and easily into a document. So, you’re writing a report or some technical documentation. All you need to do is head to the Insert tab and click on the Screenshot button sitting in the Illustrations area. If you have a multitude of other applications open, you’ll see a screen rather like this:

You then just select your chosen screenshot and it’s inserted painlessly into the open document.