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!
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.
This is a short post, but it’s something I missed off the previous Outlook 2010 post. It’s to note a feature of Outlook 2010 that I forgot to include, but that I think will be very useful to lawyers (as well as Legal IT staff, Knowledge Management staff etc etc).
RSS feeds into the Inbox!
There used to be a great add-in to Outlook (Newsgator Inbox) from a company called Newsgator. This brought RSS feeds into Outlook, allowing you to read your RSS feeds in an Outlook style interface. I used this for some years until I switched to their stand alone FeedDemon product when they acquired that. Newsgator switched focus a while ago to SharePoint, but for those that were aware of Newsgator Inbox then the Outlook 2010 functionality is very similar.
Basically you have an RSS Feeds folder in Outlook and in here you can add feeds. This allows a very familiar interface from which lawyers can use RSS feeds (without the need for further training of yet another product).
No Option RSS feed in Outlook 2010
As they are in your Outlook profile they follow you around from machine to machine in your organisation (similar to the synchronise function that was available in Newsgator Inbox). See below for the posts available in Outlook Web Access under Exchange 2003.
For those of you that use Google Reader, unfortunately there is no way to synchronise with your Google Reader feeds as yet. But you can import OPML files into Outlook 2010 (OPML = Outline Processor Markup Language – an open standard format which can be used to import/export feed entries from one service to another). Take a look at this article if you want to know how. This could also be an easy way to populate a set of feeds that would be useful to a specific set of lawyers.
It’s been a couple of months since I last blogged about my thoughts on Outlook 2010. You can read my previous two posts here and here (and on the Legal IT Professionals site, here and here) or you can just use the Office 2010 Series category to the right.
This post is a look at the presence, contacts and social connector features in Outlook 2010.
First let’s look at the contact cards. In the contacts folder there isn’t anything revolutionary, it’s pretty much the same as previous versions. But it’s the exposure of this contact information in other parts of Outlook that is a nice addition in 2010. Just hover over a contact anywhere in Outlook (on an appointment, an email address etc) and you get the following pop-up displayed:
From here you can do a number of things. You can of course use the arrow in the bottom right to get more details of the contact. This can be information from your contacts folder or information held about people in your organisation address books.
But in addition from this pop-up you can start integrating into other parts of Outlook. So click on the email icon to send an email to the person or the icon to schedule a meeting (where it will show their availability where the contact is in your organisation).
Also from here you start to see the integration into other Microsoft products. So if you have Office Communicator in your organisation, you can see the presence of the contact (i.e. whether they are online, in a meeting, away, busy etc), you can start an IM (instant messaging) conversation or initiate a phone call with the person. Just like the rest of Office 2010 it’s all about having the right functionality available in the right place!
Another nice addition is the “Suggested Contacts” folder. This looks at the emails you send and builds up a collection of contacts for you. Initially you think “in most cases won’t that just be the email address and maybe a name?” Not necessarily!
Let’s look at how Outlook 2010 expands the contact card within the new People Pane and also allows you to expand it further with “social connectors”.
This area, below the email reading pane, works in a similar way to Xobni for those that have used that application. You can see an example above. In the top right of the people pane are all the contacts from the email (To:, CC: etc), click on a contact and you see details of other emails from that person, appointments you have with the person or attachments you have received from the person.
If you’ve got one of the Outlook Social Connectors installed then you can also see social media status updates, RSS feeds etc from the person. In the above image you can see I have the Linkedin social connector installed, this would be an excellent addition to Outlook 2010 for lawyers. As clients or prospective clients email you (or are cc’d in emails to you) you can immediately see information from their linkedin profile!
There are also social connectors for facebook, windows live messenger and myspace available from Microsoft at the moment.
But in addition there is a Social Connector Software Development Kit available from Microsoft, so there is the opportunity for law firms to develop their own social connectors. The obvious one is to pull richer information on internal contacts from intranets or people databases the firm may have.
Looking to the world of third party legal IT vendors, this has to be a great area for CRM in law firms. LexisNexis surely have to develop a connector for InterAction! It would be a perfect addition, allowing lawyers to instantly see up to date information on clients.
Also for Knowledge Management, a connector into the DMS (document management system) or Knowledge Management Systems to see documents or content authored by a particular contact within the organisation.
With all the added functionality and the flexibility in Outlook 2010 the difficult job for those Project Managers having to run the Office 2010 projects is where to draw that line under your project scope!
In this second post on Outlook 2010 I’ll be taking a look at the calendar functionality. There are some really nice features that I’m sure will please a lot of lawyers (and if not the lawyers then certainly their secretaries!). There are plenty of screen shots which you can zoom into by simply clicking on the image.
So first up is a look at calendar views and there are a few nice touches to point out here.
There is a combined calendar and task view. So as well as seeing the Monday to Friday view of appointments you get to see the days tasks listed as well.
Calendar combined with Tasks
Then there is the overlay view where you can overlay a number of calendars on top of each other to see combined appointments.
Another nice touch is the option on the main ribbon that allows you to create “calendar groups”. Basically a way of grouping shared calendars together into logical groups and thus ease viewing other people’s calendars. For example, this would allow in one click to quickly view project members calendars for scheduling a project meeting.
Outlook 2010 really seems to be about helping you with what you want to do rather than adding loads of new features. So there is a schedule view, which is just another way of viewing multiple calendars. But this way round it’s much easier to see free time.
Schedule View
And again in this view there another little short cut, where if you haven’t got access to view someone’s calendar there is a quick way to request permission by simply clicking on the little icon below the persons name in the left column.
Request calendar permissions
And what the recipient gets
Once a calendar appointment has been created and the meeting request sent out, then as a recipient of the request Outlook 2010 makes it easier for you too.
First off you see your calendar for the day of the meeting request. This is one of the features I like best as you can immediately see your calendar for the day in question, as well as meeting conflicts etc, thus allowing you to make the decision on whether to attend the meeting quickly.
Appointment request
Then once you’ve decided whether to accept or not, you can do so simply by one action on the ribbon.
Quick response possible
In fact you don’t need to be in the calendar view to initiate meetings. You can very quickly set up a meeting from an email. So say you get some information from a colleague on a deal from the client, you can with just one click set up a meeting with them and the team to discuss. Simply by clicking on the “Reply with Meeting” option on the ribbon.
Quickly create a meeting request
In fact you can set up “Quick Steps” to do a number of things. Say you want a one click button the create an email to the Team. Just set up a “Quick Step”, chose your action, your To: list and it’s there as a one click option on your ribbon!
Set up a "Quick Step"
Finally there should be an option when creating a meeting request called “Meeting suggestions”. I’ve not got this to work in my installation, so I’m presuming you need Exchange 2007/2010. But basically this appears when you create a meeting request and it does as it says, the schedules for attendees are analyzed and the best time is suggested based on everyone’s availability. Take a look at this Microsoft article for information on this.
It’s worth noting that I’ve got my Outlook 2010 connected to an Exchange 2003 server, so there could be other functionality that is added or changed when connected to an Exchange 2010 environment.
In fact I’m sure there are plenty of other useful features around calendars and appointments, so if you find any please share them in the comments!
I’ve been running Microsoft’s Office 2010 on my home PC for about a month now and have to say I’m impressed. Well as impressed as you can be with an email client, a word processor and a spreadsheet application!
I thought I’d share in a few blog posts some of the really nice features of Outlook 2010 that I think will be useful for lawyers. For the first post I want to take a look at a couple of nice ways in which Outlook 2010 helps you organise and find email.
The conversation thread
This arrangement of the Inbox quickly tidies up all those email conversations. It allows you to maintain a date organised view of your emails, but then it groups a conversation into one line (see in the image below how the single email for Today is in fact a rolled up conversation).
click on the image to zoom
The conversation can then be expanded. The great thing about this is that it spans emails in other folders and even in other Outlook data files (e.g. a PST/archive file, which it does with my Archive Folders PST in the example below)
click on the image to zoom
You can then quickly tidy up your email by a right click on the conversation and selecting “Clean up conversation”. This will then remove superfluous messages from the conversation.
Search
The search in Outlook 2010 is much nicer than previously (for information, my previously is Outlook 2003).
When you start typing in your search you quickly get a drop down to allow you to limit the search to a person (from) or subject if required.
click on the image to zoom
The results are then highlighted both in the subject and in the body of the email.
click on the image to zoom
There is also a quick link at the bottom of the results to allow you to quickly expand the search scope from the folder you are in to all mail.
Finally on search, as with the rest of Outlook 2010, the ribbon is now here. After initial confusion as to where everything has gone, the ribbon becomes an asset. For example once you’ve done a search the ribbon switches to the search ribbon and provides useful options to you to use without having to go hunting through menus.
click on the image to zoom
There are a couple of reservations I have regarding search in Outlook 2010 searching though:
Performance – the indexing of all the email data. I’m not noticing any performance impact on my PC (a fairly old Pentium 4 machine), but my exchange mailbox at home is only 60Mb and the PST file attached is only 560Mb. When you’ve got a lawyer with three or four 2Gb PSTs you could be testing your PC’s!
If you’re planning to run on Windows XP – you will need to install the latest desktop search software from Microsoft, Outlook 2010 uses this for it’s search rather than an in built search. If you’re moving to Windows 7 this isn’t an issue.
Further thoughts
Whilst using these two pieces of functionality in Outlook 2010, one thing struck me.
How will this work with Document and Email management systems?
In the conversation threads how would this integrate with emails filed in the document management system (DMS)? Similarly with the search, integration to expand the scope of your search to include not just other mail in your inbox but emails in the DMS would be nice.
Microsoft has gone to some great lengths to really think about how you use email and streamline things to make everything just where you want it. There is a challenge for Legal IT providers to integrate into Outlook 2010 in a way that complements this.
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.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about email recently and I mean a LOT! I’ve concluded I hate the stuff, both on a personal level and on an enterprise level. It’s like sand, it gets everywhere and you can’t get rid of the stuff. And even if you put it in a sandbox, you’re still finding the stuff all over your feet and clothes for days.
The worst thing is that email plays to our natural instinct to hoard. We actively go and collect the stuff. Then we keep hold of it for years! I know of lawyers who have mailboxes running in the Gb’s and have inboxes with tens of thousands of items in them. I remember doing a rollout in 2005 and noticing PST’s in lawyers mailboxes going back to the early 1990’s!
So what does it matter if we collect the stuff? Well let’s ignore the fact that as a lawyer there should be an organised file somewhere (PDF) and just look at the pain they cause…
First off the performance nightmare!
The chances are you’ll be storing all the stuff in Microsoft Exchange and Outlook like most corporates.
Matt Cain, lead email analyst at Gartner. "We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial email market by 2010”
Bottom line is big mailboxes equal bad performance (unless you’re lucky enough to have a quad core desktop with a solid state hard drive at work!). There are a number of factors involved in Outlook performance, but basically big in size (Gb) is bad and big in number of items is bad!
Sure Exchange 2007 brought improvements as did Outlook 2007 Sp1 on the desktop. And Outlook/Exchange 2010 may bring more, but if email usage continues to grow then they will just be playing constant catch up (also I bet most of you are on Office 2003!).
Then you have to worry about storage!
There are probably gigabytes or terabytes (or petabytes!!!) of the stuff that your organisation collects. More and more money thrown at playing catch up with shelves of discs to collect all the emails you hoard. Sure if you’re a small firm you can outsource your email to say GMail or as a large corporate perhaps to a hosting company (it might ease the hassle but probably not the cost). In fact I suspect that maybe this is the future, we will treat email as a utility like with we do electricity. But that’s not addressing the problem is it? It’s like buying space at Big Yellow Self Storage because your back bedroom is full and you can’t bring yourself to throw away your shoe, comic, book, record (delete as applicable) collection!
So what’s the future?
Can’t we just kill it off? As well as performance and storage there’s the time sucking controlling nature of the stuff. I was hoping instant messaging (IM), wikis or social media would kick in and reduce emails dominance (like facebook has virtual killed my useful home email, I say useful to distinguish from the almost spam messages I get from sites like LinkedIn, Amazon etc). It’s starting slowly in firms but IM is like the healthy vegetable sat next to the krispy kreme doughnut of email!
I don’t have all the answers for the problem above unfortunately. But if someone can solve them for me, then from a lawyers perspective I did come up with an idea for organising the stuff that would require virtually no effort on the lawyers time. No filing, no tagging, but that’s a post for another day ……
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