Outlook 98

Outlook 97 was a brave attempt by Microsoft to integrate Schedule+ and Exchange into one cohesive whole, but sadly, there were so many things that felt unfinished or unpolished that many people were put off. Now, in a break from the usual practice of releasing a new version of the application, along with a new version of Office, Microsoft is offering us Outlook 98 - and it's free, at least until the end of June.

Outlook 98 is a fully-featured Personal Information Manager (PIM), like Lotus Organizer, but it also includes email, fax and newsgroup facilities - which elevates it to the status of Desktop Information Manager, according to Microsoft. It centres around your Personal Information Store, which contains different folders: Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, Journal, Notes and Tasks. The main Outlook display is endlessly configurable: you can choose to see all the folders in a tree structure, access them via the Outlook Bar. Indeed, in each module, clicking an Organize button informs you about all the ways to view your data.

Outlook's multiple sources of information can also be summarised in the new Outlook Today screen, which is constructed in HTML and displays current tasks, how many unread emails you have and your imminent appointments. There's also a handy contact search box which launches a quick find through your contacts list.

To cover all the PIM bases, Microsoft is making Outlook 98 available in two versions. One is for corporate users and has MAPI code to communicate with Microsoft Exchange Server. The other is an Internet-only version aimed mainly at home users. This is smaller, faster and friendlier than the corporate version - it also supports many new Internet protocols such as IMAP, LDAP and S-MIME. Both versions can connect to Internet mail services. You should choose the corporate version only if you need support for Exchange Server.

A modular approach

If you're using Outlook as your main PIM, then you'll be spending a lot of time in the Calendar module. It's as fully-featured as any PIM on the market, allowing you to schedule appointments, meetings and events, and set reminders for when any are due. Your schedule can be viewed in a variety of ways, with items able to be marked as free, busy, tentative or 'out of office'. This is important when it comes to scheduling meetings because, if you use Exchange Server, then everyone can see when you're free, busy or out of the office. If you use the Internet-only version you have to set a standard place on your company network or intranet where everyone's free/busy information will be published. Either way, when you need a meeting with someone, Outlook should be able to find a slot when you're all free.

Meetings can also be scheduled on-line. When your meeting's due, Outlook launches NetMeeting and then all the participants should be able to connect and have their meeting. This is great if you need to demonstrate software or collaborate on documents with people outside your office.

As you'd expect, Outlook handles contacts in a fairly comprehensive manner. Address information for a contact can be typed as one block, and after prompting Outlook will intelligently separate the country, postcode, county and city information into different fields. This means the contact will display all the address info in one field, but you can also sort or search by another field. A wealth of information can be stored about each contact's phone numbers - there are 19 field types, such as assistant, pager and telex numbers. To phone a contact you simply press the telephone icon on the toolbar and Outlook will dial the number for you, assuming you're using a modem. You can also store up to three email addresses per person and then either drag their entry to the Inbox or press the New Message to Contact button on the toolbar to email them. If you sort or search your contacts by category, you can even send an email to everyone in a particular category.