outlook

RunningMan Calendar touts itself as a full-featured, easy-to-use calendar, but after getting our hands on it, we found it to be anything but.

RunningMan Calendar's user interface is, well, clunky. The Help menu on the publisher's Web site does offer some helpful information--for example, the main Help menu will give you a list of what is possible with this calendar--but we found it overall limited in its scope. We got started by clicking on a day in the calendar, hitting the File button, and adding an anniversary. A notepad document popped up with instructions on how to type … Read more

Google is working on an update to its Google App Sync software, the latest version of which breaks Microsoft's Windows Desktop Search along with several plug-ins found in Outlook.

A post by Google on its enterprise blog late Tuesday details some of the broken plug-ins, which include Adobe's Acrobat PDF Maker toolbar, as well as Microsoft's Office Outlook Connector and Outlook change notifier. As a fix, Google is recommending that users with Google App Sync installed, and who need to use these tools and plug-ins simply uninstall the program until a fix can be made.

While the … Read more

Stress can be alleviated, say the gurus at TROG Bar, if we understand that it isn't the result of being too busy, but instead from trying to manage (and actively remember) all of our tasks all at once. With that in mind, the TROG Bar presents a flexible system to keep your tasks organized and offers you help getting the most from the program.

TROG Bar (which, by the way, is short for Total, Relaxed Organization Guru) integrates nicely with Microsoft Outlook and can work in conjunction with several popular task management systems such as Franklin Covey and Getting … Read more

Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps--and away from Microsoft's Exchange e-mail software--without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.

Microsoft's Outlook has been the dominant e-mail client within the business world for years, and Google's new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in acknowledges that some business workers just aren't ready to give up that familiar interface, even if their CIOs are anxious to get everybody onto Google's version of the cloud. Businesses who have already signed up for Google Apps Premier Edition--as well as Education Edition customers--will be able … Read more

Trend Micro is warning about a phishing attempt that targets users of Microsoft Outlook.

The phishing e-mail arrives in Outlook e-mail in-boxes and looks like it comes from Microsoft. It prompts recipients to reconfigure their Outlook by clicking on a link that leads to a Web site that asks for an account name and password, as well as mail server information, according to the TrendLabs Malware Blog.

By getting the mail server information, the phishers would get total access to the Outlook user's account and be able to read e-mails and use it to spam others, TrendLabs said.

If you followed the steps in my post from August on merging your Outlook and Gmail contacts, you may have ended up with duplicates in your contact lists. Microsoft's advice for deleting duplicate contacts is to sort them by the date modified, Ctrl-select the ones you want to remove, and press delete.

The problem is, the duplicate entries probably aren't identical, so you're almost certain to delete some data along with the dupe. What you need is a way to merge the information in the duplicate contacts. There's no such feature in Outlook, but if you're willing to spend $30, you can make short work of your extraneous Outlook entries by running 4Team's Duplicate Killer for Outlook.

The program deletes or merges duplicate e-mail messages, calendar entries, tasks, and notes in addition to contacts. I tested the program with Outlook 2007 but, according to the vendor, it works with Outlook 2000, XP, and 2003 as well. The new version, 3, is said to work with "Microsoft Exchange type folders including public folders," according to the vendor's Web site, but I ran it on a standalone Outlook installation.

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This free Outlook plug-in introduces many useful features to the e-mail client, but it lacks that essential intangible: stability. iLook Social installs as a sidebar pane and brings souped-up searching and filtering, robust Skype integration, nonfunctioning e-mail controls, e-mail content and attachment exporting, and somewhat mediocre Facebook support.

The search and Skype features are the strongest, but could be better. Boolean searches are not supported, nor are cross-folder queries, and the nature of Outlook requires you to manually create a new search results folder that iLook doesn't address. The Skype support is strong, with decent chat quality, contact list … Read more

Improving Outlook is no easy feat given that it's notoriously anti-social when it comes to social networking. The free Outlook plug-in iLook Social and Outlook tries to make Microsoft's ubiquitous e-mail client a bit more sociable by including souped-up searching and filtering, Skype integration, e-mail controls, content and attachment exporting, and Facebook support.

For a sidebar pane, it's a good list of features with an interface that integrates smoothly into Outlook 2007. Desktop e-mail clients are going to have to adapt to social networking far better than they have to survive, especially if the future of e-mail … Read more

After making a splash helping Windows users quickly search for conversations and contacts in their endless Outlook in-boxes with Xobni, the e-mail organizer company shared its plan on Monday to make the same service available for BlackBerry.

Xobni wouldn't elaborate on any program details, like how exactly it will look and work on the BlackBerry, but they did say that it will involve integration with the phone's address book.

"The app will be focused on contact and relationship management and bring a lot of the relationship features people like from Xobni in Outlook to the BlackBerry," … Read more