Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #10 Out of Office

OK, this one’s a bit of a cheat as it’s not really a cool new feature, more a case of “where on earth has it gone?”. Yes this one’s a bit like the big print button (you know that one that stares you in the face on the Print pane but first time in you spent ages looking for!), it’s right there on the backstage.

If you’ve got Outlook 2010 communicating to an Exchange 2003 environment, then your Out of Office will be a familiar pop-up where you can just enter your message. However if you’ve got Exchange 2010 then you get some additional options which are quite handy.

• First you can have different messages for internal recipients and external recipients. Handy when you want to provide extra contact information for employees of your firm on who to contact but which you may not want to pass onto the client.

• Also you can setup specific times for auto responses. So if you want to send auto responses only in business hours for example.

• You have the choice of using HTML in out of office replies, not sure why you’d want to but it’s there.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #8 Using drag and drop to create tasks

Alright the title is a little misleading and this one definitely goes in the category of “I just found this out but it could well have been there in Office 2007 and maybe even 2003!”, but I hope you’ll forgive the inclusion, it’s new for me in 2010 and I think it’s really useful.

It’s a quick way of using tasks rather than your Inbox as your task list.

How many times have you heard lawyers (or even people in Legal IT depts) say they use their Inbox as a to-do list? (I’ve even heard of some people using their deleted items folder as a task list but let’s not go there!). This tip is a quick way to use drag and drop to quickly create a task using the information within the email.

The scenario:

• You get an email that requires an action.

• You want to keep the information on the email with the task.

• You could (as I used to) create a task with – refer to email from Jason 02/08/2011. But you can’t clear that email out until the task has been actioned.

OR

• You can drag and drop your email to the Tasks navigation button in the bottom left, when you let go of the mouse button a task is created with the Subject as the title of that email and with the content of the email in the task body. Set your due date and then you can delete the email. Job done!

This also works for calendar items. So if you want to pull a meeting together where the email would be useful pasting into the meeting request, just use the same process and drag and drop into the Calendar navigation button.

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.