No option for Law Firm

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #6 The organiser pane

I love the “organiser pane” or “right hand pane” in Outlook 2010, but you’ll need a nice sized widescreen monitor to really appreciate it!

I have my Outlook set up with the vertical reading pane (what you still use the horizontal reading pane?? That’s so Outlook 2000!). So I’ve got my traditional 3 panes. From left to right I’ve the folders list, then my email items view and then my reading pane. Outlook 2010 then brings me a fourth pane.

In here I can see a view of the current month with my upcoming appointment just below. Then under that I’ve my current tasks. And finally the people I’ve most recently IM’d (instant messaged using Office Communicator or Lync, more of IM integration in a later post).

So without having to jump into my calendar and tasks, in one view I can see all my recent stuff. Emails, Appointments, Tasks and contacts! It doesn’t sound much but it is one of the most useful features I’ve encountered in 2010.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #5 Mailbox cleanup

As a lawyer you will undoubtedly have an Inbox that is at times out of control. I’ve seen some fantastic examples, item counts that are nudging the 40,000 mark and mailbox sizes that run into tens of gigabytes!

So how to control? Well good filing habits and tools like Autonomy’s EMM FileSite addin help, but there is always the good old fashioned way. Delete!

In the backstage view of Outlook 2010 there’s a nice prominent button called Cleanup Tools and in here there’s a great feature that’s no longer hidden away, Mailbox cleanup.

From here you’ll get a nice dialogue where you can quickly see the size of your Mailbox and find those emails that you are happy to get rid of.  By searching for all those large emails from months ago.

I know these features have been in previous versions of Outlook, but I like in 2010 how they are brought to the surface in a more prominent place. Also it’s always good to keep on top of your Mailbox, a very large mailbox is a major cause of Outlook performance and stability problems!

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #3 Overlay mode and Group calendars

First up group calendars. Yes I know they’ve been around for a while in Outlook, but I think they’re pretty cool and worth a mention before moving onto Overlay Mode.

Basically from the calendar ribbon I can select Calendar Groups->Create New. From here I can create a calendar group from a distribution list. This creates a group with links to all the peoples calendars that are in that distributiuon list. Best of all is that my list of calendars will stay up to date as people leave or are added to the distribution list!

Now the next cool feature of Outlook 2010, Overlay Mode. From my list of calendars I can select those I want to view. I then get a nice colour coded view of all our calendars.

I can then use the arrows to the left of the persons name in the “calendar tab” to overlay all the calendars into a single view. This is really helpful when trying to identify when you can fit in that meeting!

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #2 Quick Steps

These are basically shortcuts that allow you to do common tasks quickly, they are available on the Home ribbon so they are available without having to click elsewhere. In the example below (which is the default) I can quickly fire off an email to my boss with one click or fire off an email to my team.

Creating new quick steps is easy and I can set up actions to do pretty much anything. So perhaps I wanted a quick step to tag an email with a category and then move it to a particular folder or maybe just something simple that I do time and time again that I want available on the Home ribbon.

Finally today an extra feature as it works quite like a Quick Step.

Just to the left of the quick steps is a nice feature allowing you to reply to the recipients of an email with a meeting request. Pretty handy when, for example, you need to pull a quick meeting together with your project team.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #1 Conversation views

One of my favourite features of Outlook 2010 is the Conversation view.

Basically it’s a way to group all your emails in a thread regardless of which folder those emails are in.

So in the example above from my Inbox, the first two emails are unfiled. Then Outlook has pulled all the other emails in the thread together from sub-folders. Thus allowing me to see the whole conversation in one place.

When first expanding the thread Outlook will only show those most recent, I can then click expand again to see all the emails. These settings are configurable on the View ribbon -> conversation settings.

Another couple of new features that are related are worth mentioning at this point:

Clean Up will remove superfluous messages from the thread and Ignore will remove any future messages from the thread. I’m not entirely sure about the latter one though!

One word of warning for those using WorkSite 8.5 SP2 u4 or less, there is a small problem with conversation views if you use the apply to ALL folders. Things work fine though if you just apply to folders one by one. Autonomy are aware of this and it is scheduled to be fixed.