Product Reviews

Schedule+ and Exchange were core applications in Office 95 for anyone who was connected to a network, and many who weren't. Outlook is Microsoft's attempt to blend the two and add contact management. The result is a very ambitious application.

The main Outlook screen is divided into two. On the left is the Outlook bar, a customisable scrolling window that can also hold personal folders, and shortcuts to file folders on your hard disk or network. On the right is the main Outlook window, which holds whatever you've selected on the Outlook bar. By default this includes Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Journal, Notes and Deleted Items. All Outlook data is contained in folders which can be Outlook-specific, such as Contacts or user-defined for storing email and so on.

Annoyingly, switching between modules using the Outlook bar icons always puts you at the top of the relevant list. You can open a separate window for each module by right-clicking on an Outlook bar icon, but it takes up a lot of desktop real estate. Each module can be viewed in several different ways - Contacts, for example, can be viewed as a phone list or as address cards.

Integration between modules is good. You can drag and drop items between windows or onto Outlook bar icons, and this launches an appropriate action. For example, when you drag a Contact onto the Inbox a new message will be created if the contact has an email address. Dragging a mail message onto Contacts creates a new Contact with the email message placed in the Notes field.

The Calendar looks like Schedule+, with panes for day, week or month view, next to a mini-calendar for the month and a Task list called TaskPad. You can view the calendar and TaskPad alongside any of the standard day/week/month views, but only by dragging the right side of the window to reveal them.

The Meeting Planner is now better integrated into the appointment editor, with a separate tab for inviting other people and viewing their schedules. Contacts with email addresses can be included and sent meeting invitations. If they're using Outlook for email, buttons to Accept or Decline meetings appear on the message they receive.

In a mixed environment, some users may wish to continue using Schedule+ as their calendar, and if this is detected on your system, the Office 97 installer gives the option of using it as the default calendar. You can switch between the two options from within Outlook, and Outlook will import appointments, contacts and Tasks directly from any version of Schedule+.

The new Inbox is like Exchange, with subtle differences. The default view uses AutoPreview, which displays the first few lines of any received mail. Mail can arrive either over a network or over a dial-up connection, and double-clicking a mail item opens up a standard separate window showing the whole text of the message and options to reply or forward.

When an old message is opened, a status panel tells you whether you've replied to or forwarded the message, though there's no easy of way of going directly to the associated reply. In the list of messages, icons show which messages have been replied to or forwarded, and other flags indicate attachments and a message marked for later attention. The Inbox Assistant, which lets you set up rules for sorting incoming mail and so on, isn't available unless you're using Exchange Server. This is odd given Outlook's integration with the Internet and the fact that Microsoft's Internet Mail client doesn't have this limitation.

Contacts is where you keep your list of companies, people, phone numbers, journal conversations,

You can search through Outlook-specific fields with the Find tool, although there's no easy way to search all the fields in your Contacts for a specific word. Another oddity is typing into the contact list. Instead of performing a find by default, it adds new records or edits existing ones. To get around this, you have to turn off 'in-place editing' for the current view in the Format Table View dialog box. In fact, customising views is frustrating - for instance, the alphabetical tab index that appears in the Address Cards view can't be used anywhere else.

Unusually, Outlook doesn't separate companies and people. You can group people under company name headings in many of the views, but there's no way to globally change a company's details, so when a large company moves, you have to change each address manually.

The Journal lets you log interactions with your contacts. Dragging a contact onto the Journal icon creates a new entry, with the contact details included, and a shortcut to the contact in the Notes field. There's also a timer for recording conversations.

While Outlook's Journal isn't a bad first effort, there are flaws. There's no way of linking Journal entries, such as follow-up conversations or letters, and no means of tracking a project through conversations with different people in the same company.

Sending letters to Contacts is integrated with Word, launching the app and a Letter Wizard to let you enter details. You're restricted to the standard Microsoft styles, although you can change the original templates. There's no option to create a letter using your own templates or to create new ones, however. The other option is to do a mailmerge from within Word using your own template and the Outlook Contacts list as your data source, though it's slow and problematic. Choosing the data source results in a wait as Word reads in the whole of the Contacts database. You can then do a Query to find the single record you want, and finally you have your mailmerge letter.

Next time I opened the document it complained it couldn't find a file called 'C: CurrentC ~~ ~~~_virtual_file_~~~ olk', and offered to find it, remove the data header or remove the mailmerge information completely. The file was a temporary file created when Word queried Outlook, which was no longer on my system.

In contrast with the other Office 97 apps, the toolbars in Outlook aren't customisable. This is a shame, as an information manager is probably the app that will be customised most. I often flag email messages for later action, but I can't add a button to the main Inbox toolbar to do this. I have to use the right mouse button menu or else open the message and use the Flag button there.

Form design is quite powerful, but you can't alter the originals: you can only create new forms. However, you can publish forms to a network and let others use them. Several sample forms are included in the Office ValuPack. Indeed, inside Outlook there's a vast workgroup customisation engine which lets you share public folders, create and publish forms, share Journals and so on, but it's hard to find and often frustrating to implement.

As a standalone PIM, Outlook works well over the Internet with extra facilities if your correspondents are also using Outlook. Those looking for a fully-featured sales tracking system would do better to look at products like Act! or Goldmine (reviewed p192 and p188).

Given the maturity of the contact manager market, it's a shame that this section is so difficult to use effectively. Indeed, compared with Office's other polished and mature components, Outlook looks a bit rough around the edges. However, if you're using the Schedule+ and Exchange combo, upgrading to Outlook is worth the effort, if only to get everything together in a well-integrated whole.