As part of an IT roll-out in the office the entire PC Pro team was moved over to Office 365 last week. For the most part it meant no change at all. After a quick call to IT the morning after the transition to get some some account details adjusted (I’d had no email since 9pm the previous day), I was able to carry on working, using my standard desktop installation of Office 2010, including Outlook, just as normal.

That’s no surprise. After all, Office 365 principally represents a change in the way businesses purchase and manage licenses for Microsoft Office software. From a user perspective, the desktop software – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – stays the same.

However, we have received one major upgrade – from our old, clunky webmail service to the swanky new Outlook Web App – and it could be about to change the way I work.

Now, when I log into the Dennis Publishing webmail address, I’m faced with an interface that actually looks like a proper email client, not the abomination of an interface that adorned the webmail before.

The layout is modern and fresh, but most importantly the web interface is quick – blindingly so – with keyword searches completed in a blink of an eye, faster even than my desktop Outlook client can manage.

Now I realise this may have as much to do with the way our Exchange servers were set up (and possibly because my desktop PC is running on steam) as the native speed of the Web App, but it’s been a revelation, and has persuaded me to carry out an experiment.

I’m going to try and use the Outlook Web App – and only the Outlook Web App – to see if it’s a workable alternative in a busy office environment.

The first few days

So far, I’ve been using it exclusively since Friday and I’m glad to report I have few complaints. I no longer have to wait an age as Outlook slowly rouses itself out of its morning stupor. Once Chrome is launched, the Web App takes less than three seconds to appear, so I can get to work straight away.

And I’ve come across very little that I can’t do in this version of Outlook. I can see all my folders, set up meetings and see others’ free time while doing so. I can set up tasks and assign them to members of my team. I can filter search results by category and attachment.

I’m also a real fan of the way the Outlook Web App displays conversations as an expandable list in both the message list and reading pane. This can be switched off, and doing so reveals another plus: the Outlook Web App’s settings and features feel much more accessible and easier to find than on the complex and intimidating desktop app.

Flies in the ointment

There are some annoyances, though, and the main one is a lack of pop-up notifications, although since I have the interface displayed permanently on my second monitor, that’s not the issue it could be.

Another is that I can’t display all I want on the screen. I normally have a to-do list displayed in a narrow pane on the right hand side; the Outlook Web App is restricted to email or calendar or contacts or tasks, not a combination of two or more. I’m not a huge fan of the way some keyboard shortcuts I’m used to work – CTRL-R – while others do not – CTRL-N.

However, these for me are minor irritations, and I say that because I haven’t yet been tempted back to the desktop client. Time may change my opinion, of course – what seem now like quirks may turn into full-blown pet hates – but for now I’m happy with this brave new world.

Step 1. Open up an email in Outlook 2010

There’s probably an empty thumbnail at the bottom-left of the email (it will only include a photo if you already link to that person via the LinkedIn connector, which launched with Outlook 2010). Press the thumbnail and you’ll see this.

Step 2. Add that person on “another social network”

Click on the Add button, then select “on another social network”.

Step 3. View other social network providers

Click on the “View social network providers available online” link at which point you’ll be taken here…

Step 4. Connect to your favourite social network

Previously this page only showed LinkedIn and myspace – now Facebook and Windows Live Messenger appear. All the instructions below should apply equally to Windows Live, but annoyingly the link above is broken right now (this is the correct link for Windows Live Messenger’s Social Connector provider). For the rest of this guide we’ll only talk about Facebook.

Step 5. Download the Facebook provider

Click on the Facebook icon and you’ll be directed to this download page. Scroll down until you see the two Download buttons – one for the 64-bit version of Office (OSCFB-x64-en-us.exe) and one for the 32-bit version (OSCFB-x86-en-us.exe). Download your chosen version and then double-click to install it.

Step 6. Download Outlook Social Connector 1.1

You’ll first be prompted to update the latest version of Outlook Social Connector, which will be downloaded automatically. Press Install and choose to automatically close Outlook when prompted.

Step 7. Almost there…

Outlook will restart with all your windows in the same position as before, but with a comforting message saying “The installation is complete”.

But that only refers to Outlook Social Connector 1.1. You will (probably) still find a dialog box open prompting you to install the Outlook Social Connector Provider for Facebook.

Step 8. Install the Facebook Social Connector Provider

Click Install and within seconds you’ll see the following screen:

Step 9. Start using it!

Now, when you restart Outlook and open an email, you should find Facebook added to the list of Social Network Accounts.

Select Facebook and you’ll be prompted to enter your login details. Then press Finish.

Hey presto, you’ll be able to see your friends’ Facebook feeds whenever you click on the People Pane in one of their emails.

Note, though, that this isn’t a way to update your details – you’ll still need to head to Facebook itself, or use a dedicated app, to do this.

You had to jump through three or four hoops in Office 2003 and Office 2007 to add them (clicking Tools | Options | Calendar Options and then tickboxing “Show week numbers in the Month View and Date Navigator”), but fortunately Outlook 2010 makes it much easier.

Or at least, easier to explain. So, here are the three steps you need to add week numbers in Outlook 2010.

First, click File to bring up the Backstage View.

Second, click the Options button and then the Calendar button, third from top.

Third, scroll down until you see the checkbox option “Show week numbers in the month view and in the Date Navigator”. Check the checkbox.

Lo and behold, the numberless view you had before (below left) is now basking in the full glory of week numbers.

Easy? Yes indeed. But it took me about 20 minutes to find this option hiding away, because I was foolishly hunting around the Ribbon looking for the right setting.

UPDATE: The first commenter to this post, Chris, pointed out that Outlook determines the first week of the year by default as the first week that includes January 1.

But you can change this. In Calendar Options (see the second step above), you can choose between three different ways to determine the first week. See the screenshot below. However, there’s no way I know of to force Outlook into tying week 1 into your company’s financial year.

We’ll start with the Calendar view. The colour coding isn’t new, nor the ability to view two calendars simultaneously, but the Home tab now offers quick access to far more options very quickly. Here are the other tabs:

When it comes to actually being invited to a meeting, you could see something like this:

It’s worth noting those five avatars at the bottom. If I had photos of the five other attendees in Outlook, these would appear there. I can also click on that upwards arrow next to the avatars and see this…

In an organisation with SharePoint implemented it can go far beyond pics. I’d be able to see if someone was online and available to instant message, get their social-networking updates and all sorts of glorious updates. For all those companies that don’t have SharePoint implemented, you’re more likely to see something like this:

So right now I can see what meetings online editor Barry Collins and I share, but that’s about it. Apart from Barry’s photo, which is always good to see, obviously. In theory, however, I should be able to see all the email exchanges we’ve had and what attachments Barry has sent me; Simon Jones talks more about the People Pane (to give this feature its official name) in today’s blog entry.

Below, you can see all the tabs on offer when you’re viewing the Inbox (click on them to make the images larger):

Then we come to the Contacts Ribbon:

And finally, the Tasks Ribbon:

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driving me up the wall.

Outlook 2010 tries to be all clever by bundling messages into “Conversations”. This is useful for when someone in the office CC’s everyone in on which pub to go to and you spend Friday afternoon battling a deluge of witty put-downs. In Outlook 2010 everything with the subject line “Let’s go to the pub!” is rolled into one conversation and you have to scroll through your inbox less.

Problem is, Outlook 2010 isn’t particularly clever when it comes to the science bit. Instead of being smart and looking at to whom an email has been sent, it simply grabs the subject line and lumps any subsequent email with the same subject line into the same conversation. So if you forward an email from a stupid person to a clever person and add a line saying “LOOK AT THIS MORON!”, Outlook will see the subject line and make it look like you’ve accidentally CC’d the idiot. I did this last week and nearly had a heart attack.

Take this screenshot. (These emails, by the way, are different to the one which nearly gave me an aneurism last week.) Greg Salmon does PR for Microsoft Office, Tim Danton is PC Pro’s editor. It looks to the untrained eye like they’re both CC’d in on an email with the subject “Office 2010”, but they’re not. It simply means I’ve sent them separate emails which Outlook has grouped into a conversation.

Microsoft claims Outlook 2010 is more intelligent than that. A spokesman reckons “the scenario of similar or exact subject lines has been accounted for by tracking the GUID [Globally Unique Identifier] of each message,” but I really can’t see it. Take the screenshot below as an example.

Naturally, this is less of a problem if you use nice, descriptive subject lines such as “Meeting on Monday the 25th to discuss the price of tea”, but I don’t. I send messages with stupid subject lines like “I’m…” and finish the rest of the sentence in the body of the email. Or I say things like “Meeting”, and suddenly Outlook thinks I’m taking part in a giant email conversation with 98 recipients.

Microsoft is keen to point out this isn’t the final product. “We are still working on this feature, and are planning improvements to our ability to differentiate conversations with the same subject line before Office 2010 ships”, said our friendly Microsoft spokesperson.

But it’s surprising that, even at this early stage – and remember this is the Technical Preview of Office 2010, it’s not even at Beta yet – the view is so far behind other conversation-threading systems already available.

For example, Gmail offers conversation threading as well, and the technology behind it sounds similar: “Gmail threading is determined by consistency within the subject headers and references headers of email. A subject header is commonly known as the subject line and a reference header appears in the “References” line within the original, raw message information,” according to the company.

That sounds a lot like the GUID that Microsoft’s talking about it but my inboxes don’t lie: Gmail is currently threading my conversations correctly, while Outlook 2010 is very hit and miss.

You can turn it off and arrange messages simply by the “To:” field like in the old days, but I don’t want to. I like the conversation feature. I use it in Gmail all the time and it’s brilliant, and I want it to be brilliant in Outlook 2010. Certainly the rest of the application is golden: searching is nearly instantaneous in my 5,000-strong inbox and I like how a business card pops up onscreen if you hover over an email address. But until Microsoft gets the conversation feature right I’ll be treading a lot more carefully in my emails.

Primary among these, so far as I’m concerned, is the new meeting request view. Not so much in the organisation phase – there are no major innovations there – but in the view that’s presented to invited members.

Before, you just got a simple message to say whether the meeting was clashing with another, and a small Calendar button so you could go and check, but now your day is actually integrated into the meeting request email – as per the screenshot above.

Suddenly it’s much easier to see whether or not you need to rearrange another meeting or if it’s just a reminder you popped there, and not a real meeting at all.

I’m now using Office 2010 as my main office suite, so if you’ve got any requests about topics for future posts then let me know. For example, I’ll be using the “Quick Steps” pane in anger over the next few days, and I’ll be interested to see whether it speeds up using Outlook… or just gets in the way.