outlook

Yahoo has high hopes for calendar makeover

Yahoo plans to begin a beta test of a major overhaul of its online calendar Wednesday, a redesign that brings new advertising and social-networking possibilities.

The new site brings a more polished Web 2.0 interface, with drag-and-drop abilities, color-coded entries, Flickr image backdrops, and a slick "zoom" feature that expands a single day's schedule to a usefully large size when browsing in the monthly view. And picking up an ability from No. 2 rival Google Calendar, the new design finally moves beyond the narrow single-user calendar idea of the earlier design.

For example, people can subscribe … Read more

E-mail alert for petrolania buffs

Do you love the "ding-ding" sound of a service station bell, triggered by driving over a pneumatic hose. Milton Alberstadt of Houston, Texas, certainly does--he makes his living selling them at Milton's Bells.

But he's also a geek, so he has rigged an interface on his PC that is triggered by incoming e-mail rules in Outlook to ring one of his bells. The "merger of the Internet and petrolania," he says.

Milton sells all the distinctly analog parts you need to do the same (bells, hose, y-splitters, and so on.) but you'll have … Read more

Zarafa: Open-source e-mail gets competitive

I'm a huge fan of Zimbra's slick email alternative to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, but I'll admit to being very impressed by Zarafa, a full Outlook/Exchange replacement with MAPI, Web access, iCal, and ActiveSync support. Zarafa recently became notable because the company open sourced its e-mail alternative to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

I spent some time with the Zarafa demo and assuming it administers as nicely as it operates for the end-user, it's a winner. Is it better than Zimbra? After all, Zimbra also has iCal, Web access, ActiveSync, etc.

It's hard to say, given that … Read more

Print your Outlook contacts as mailing labels

A friend asked if it's possible to print a subset of the addresses in her Microsoft Outlook contacts as mailing labels. You would think that such a basic operation would be a breeze for an industrial-strength personal-information manager like Outlook. You would think wrong.

The first bit of counter-intuitivity is that you use Microsoft Word, not Outlook. If you use Outlook's own mail-merge function by clicking Tools > Mail Merge, you get kicked into Word anyway. And every time I tried to run the resulting wizard, Word stalled in mid-process.

Instead, move the contacts whose addresses you want … Read more

Five killer software freebies you've (probably) never heard of

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little spoiled by all the free software out there. Seriously, I feel for the developers working hard to make a buck when there's so much good freeware. Like these five gems, all of which I use almost daily and love dearly:

CrossLoop - Need remote access to another PC? It's hard to find a simpler solution than CrossLoop. Just run the small client app on your system, then instruct the friend/grandma/user at the other end to do likewise. Presto: You're connected, able to see … Read more

Google Calendar gets more business savvy

If you've been on the fence about ditching Outlook for Google Apps you might want to give Google's efforts another look. In a blog post this morning the company outlined some of the ways Google Calendar has improved over the past month with a handful of small, but important features. Many of them are aimed squarely at business users.

One of the new improvements, flexible reminders, seems like the most minor--but it's not. Setting up reminders in the previous system had presets on when you'd be able to get the message. The new system is far … Read more

Microsoft experimenting with a pause button for incoming e-mail

Microsoft Office Labs has launched a new product called E-mail Prioritizer that will not only sort through your in-box to figure out what's important, but also give you an honest-to-goodness pause button in case you want to escape an Exchange server e-mail avalanche.

Users must be running the latest version of Outlook (2007), and for now the tool is PC-only. After installing it, you'll get a new toolbar menu option that lets you toggle on the "do not disturb" mode for a certain period of time or based on your meeting schedule. Once you return, or the timer runs out, it'll sync back up and grab new messages.

Unfortunately this is a client-side stop-gap on the way to having such an option on the Exchange server itself. Sure your server admin can put a pause on your account, but you can't. This option simply turns off Outlook's software-based e-mail antenna, so messages will still dutifully arrive on your mobile phone if you've got it set up to receive push mail.

The far more interesting half of this tool is the prioritizer itself. This will rate messages in your in box from zero to three stars. The ratings come from a system used by many folks, including several Microsoft employees I talked to back in March. For instance, e-mails sent to you and nobody else, or those from your bosses gets three stars, whereas mail you're carbon-copied on, or where you're part of a large list, scores far lower.

In my case, my in-box had about 450 messages on it, and it was prioritized in about a minute's time. To make use of it, you must learn from and train Microsoft's system, which could become second nature after a week or two of honing your in-box skills.… Read more

Merge your Outlook and Gmail contacts

I spend most of my workday Alt-Tabbing between my Gmail inbox and the Outlook account on my employer's Exchange Server. The problem is, when it comes to contacts, there isn't much overlap between the two: Only a handful of Gmail addresses are also in the Outlook contacts list, and vice-versa.

Rectifying the situation takes only a few minutes. Start by moving your Outlook contacts to Gmail. In Outlook 2003 and 2007, click File > Import and Export, select "Export to a file," click Next, choose either comma-separated value option, and click Next again. Browse to and … Read more

The Microsoft Outlook fix of last resort

A couple of weeks ago, the IT guy at my office added my company Exchange Server e-mail account to my notebook computer's copy of Microsoft Outlook 2007. The first time I tried to open Outlook after I left the office, the program crashed because it was unable to connect to the server.

I couldn't even open Outlook long enough to delete the new account. This wasn't a big problem for me for a bunch of reasons. For one, I didn't really need to access my company e-mail account from the version of Outlook on my notebook … Read more