By Joe Dolittle
There's a lot of big news coming out of Microsoft this week, especially about the upcoming Office 2010. Chief among Microsoft's announcement at their Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans was an announcement of a series of high-fidelity Office Web applications that compete squarely against those from Google.
Speaking personally, I am particularly intrigued by these new Web Office 2010 applications, because on a daily basis, I tend to flit between eight different machines (yes, that's actually true). While it's possible to install Office on all eight (and I have in the past), sometimes it's nice just to be able to open a browser Window and get to an Excel spreadsheet or a Word file.
Even better, the Web apps are going to be free, which is always nice.
Office 2010 Outlook
One interesting feature coming in the Outlook 2010, shown in Figure A, is the ability to group conversations.
FIGURE A
Here's an example of Outlook 2010's conversation grouping. (click for larger image)
Outlook will also have ability to ignore a particular conversation, as shown in Figure B, so as more and more email messages come in with the same topic, they'll all automatically be sent to the trash.
FIGURE B
You can ignore conversations. Don't do this to your boss! (click for larger image)
The conversation features have also found their way into Outlook Web Access 2010, as you can see in Figure C.
FIGURE C
Outlook 2010 Web users will be able to collapse and group conversations. (click for larger image)
Although the sample image shown in Figure D provided by Microsoft is tiny, and (sadly) runs on a Mac, Microsoft is promising that Outlook Web Access 2010 (and all the Office 2010 Web apps) will run as full-bodied applications in Firefox as well as in IE. This is great news and will probably have a strong, net-positive benefit for Microsoft. We heartily commend Microsoft for supporting browsers other than IE.
FIGURE D
Here's a tiny Firefox image running Outlook Web Access 2010. (click for larger image)
Unfortunately, some of our favorite third-party Outlook add-on vendors are getting some relatively minor competition in new Outlook features. One such feature, shown in Figures E and F, allows Outlook to notify you if you're making a mailing mistake, like sending to too many users.
FIGURE E
Think before you send. (click for larger image) FIGURE F
Really think before you send. (click for larger image)
Overall, we're very excited by the news coming out of Microsoft. Our only concern is that Outlook's performance was poor coming out of the initial Outlook 2007 release, and we hope that Microsoft is putting considerable attention into search performance as well as large-PST performance before release.
