Yesterday was the official launch of Office 2010 and it looks like this is the year of Office. And that’s Office from Microsoft not the “Open” kind as some people would have predicted.

A lot of law firms I guess thought about Office 2007, but due to one thing or another (one big one I guess being the recession) stuck with Office 2003. But now on the back of what will probably be a mass shift to Windows 7 it’ll be Office 2010 that joins the party (the show of hands in yesterday’s Workshare user group backs me up on this).

So over the next few months I’ll probably blog a fair bit about Office 2010, I’ll tag everything with Office2010 so just use the tag cloud to the right to retrieve all the posts.

This post though is just a quick look at two features in Outlook 2010 that I saw on a webcast before the launch yesterday. Both of which could benefit legal as both will help lawyers to tackle the deluge of email they receive.

• First off the Outlook OST. Yes, the OST has been part of Outlook previously (basically if you run Outlook/Exchange in cached mode the OST is the local “database” that stores your local cache of email). Following on from improvements in 2007 SP1, this has been improved to ensure it is more performant with larger mailboxes. So that’s in terms of number of items you can have in folders before performance drops and also the size of the mailbox overall that Outlook can handle efficiently. Tied to Exchange 2010 this could be a real benefit in performance over Outlook 2003 in particular!
• Next some of the email management features. Better management of email conversations, the ability to point at a conversation (or email thread) and quickly remove superfluous emails that don’t add to the conversation. Also a very powerful (or dangerous?!?!) feature to ignore further emails to the thread! Basically if you’re bored of a thread of emails you can click ignore and the thread and all future emails on that thread go into your deleted items.

I’m sure there are many more features that I’ll discover as I start to use Office 2010. In my next post though I’ll look at someways in which Workshare intend to leverage Office 2010.