The Microsoft Office 2010 beta was released Wednesday, and though there aren't many major changes from the Technical Preview from July, there are some new features and enhancements worthy of note. This post will focus on the changes to the beta, but if you want a larger overview of new features across all the applications, check out our rundown of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview.
Outlook is the cornerstone of many companies' communications and daily schedules, and as such received a lot of enhancements in Office 2010. In the beta version, Microsoft has added even more ways to connect with coworkers and contacts. The new Outlook Social Connector is an added information pane that gives you more info about everyday contacts. Once set up, you'll be able to view pictures of contacts (even in large cc lists), previous conversations, attachments shared, meetings attended, and much more. Though not complete in the beta, Microsoft says the Outlook Social Connector will soon be able to connect with social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, so you can follow status updates and more all in one location.
The Office 2010 Technical Preview introduced the Back Stage view, an enhanced File menu (accessed from the Office Icon tab) that lets you manage your documents, set permissions, and share your projects with colleagues. In the beta version Microsoft has decided to return to calling it the File menu, but with all the functionality and flexibility of Back Stage. They also have made it possible to access all the other tabs in the Ribbon, which were previously inaccessible in the Technical Preview, so you can get to the information you want quickly without the added step of exiting Back Stage.
... Read moreOutlook, Thunderbird, and Yahoo Mail put Gmail and Hotmail to shame in one important area: handling attachments. Moving e-mail-attached files to a folder on your PC is a breeze in Outlook, Thunderbird, and Yahoo Mail. Doing the same in Gmail and Hotmail? Forget it!
Freeware strips e-mail attachments in a few clicks
Back in June 2008, I wrote about Kopf Outlook Attachment Remover donationware, which lets you save some or all of the files attached to Outlook messages to your PC or network. The program adds a button to Outlook's menu that opens a single dialog box showing your attachment-removal options.
Kopf Outlook Attachment Remover's single dialog lets you save attachments to a folder outside Outlook.
(Credit: Kopf)The attachments can be removed from the message or simply copied to a separate folder. You can detach specific types of files, remove files larger than a size you choose, and save images embedded in the body of messages. Other options let you overwrite or rename duplicate files, reproduce subfolders in the target folder, and even return the files you remove to the e-mails they were originally attached to.
You get many of the same options in Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail program via the AttachmentExtractor donationware. After you download and install the add-on and restart Thunderbird, an AE Extract button is added to Thunderbird's toolbar and an AttachmentExtractor option is added to the program's Tools menu.
Selecting either option opens the add-on's settings, which let you select the target folder, save attachments of certain types or with specific attributes, and auto-extract all attachments or only those meeting specific criteria. You can also delete some or all of the attachments, mark the messages as read, and delete the messages automatically.
The AttachmentExtractor add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird provides several options for handling e-mail attachments.
(Credit: AttachmentExtractor)
Download attachments in Yahoo Mail
It's no secret that Webmail services can't match the features of their desktop counterparts, but when it comes to attachments, Yahoo Mail can teach Gmail and Hotmail a thing or two. While Gmail and Hotmail make it easy to find messages with specific types of attachments via search operators, downloading them once you've found them is another matter.
By comparison, zipping and downloading the files attached to your Yahoo Mail messages takes only a couple of clicks. In Yahoo Mail's Classic interface, click My Attachments in the left pane, select those you want to save, or click Check All to choose them all. Then click the Save to Computer button and choose Zip & Download Files button.
Yahoo Mail's attachment-extraction option makes it easy to save e-mail attachments to your PC.
(Credit: Yahoo)All the attachments are saved in a single zipped file to your browser's default file-download location. You don't get the many options provided in Outlook Attachment Remover or Thunderbird's AttachmentExtractor add-on, but at least the files are backed up and available on your PC or removable medium. I still haven't figured out how to accomplish the same feat with the attachments in Gmail and Hotmail.
Gmail and Hotmail do let you search for all attachments, and in Gmail you can find files by name or extension. To find all messages with attachments, enter has:attachment in the search box of either Gmail or Hotmail and press Enter. Gmail lets you add filename:*.doc, for example, to find only messages to which a Word .doc file is attached. You'll find a complete list of Gmail search operators on the service's help site.
Unfortunately, once you find the attachments in Gmail and Hotmail, there's not much you can do with them except open them one at a time and forward them to a POP or IMAP account. Then you can detach or otherwise process the attachments using one of the free add-ons described above.
You can also set Gmail to automatically forward messages to a POP or IMAP account. (In Hotmail you can forward automatically only to another Microsoft mail service.) I described how to forward mail from Gmail to Outlook and Thunderbird in a post from December 2007.
This won't help you detach the files already received by your Gmail account because there's no way to forward messages in bulk from Gmail. I realize that such a capability would be a spammer's dream come true, but a feature that lets you detach in bulk the files attached to Gmail messages would be nice.
Xobni streams contacts' tweets.
(Credit: Xobni)Microsoft Outlook search extension Xobni (Windows) gets a new extension of its own this week: Twitter.
Best known for speedily hunting down e-mail contacts and conversations in Microsoft Outlook, Xobni also has a social networking aspect. It includes photos courtesy of Facebook, phone numbers via Skype, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn profile information, corporate information from Hoover's, and now, a Twitter stream.
Click on the Twitter icon in the contact view to see a list of recent tweets. Icons below get you started on a reply, retweet, or new post. You can also follow, unfollow, and view the person's profile. Note that tweets may not be available for every Xobni contact. If they're not public and you're not an approved follower, you won't see much in the updates stream.
Associating a Twitter account with a contact isn't automatic. For each contact whose account you want to see, Xobni will trigger a search for matches. It will remember associations once you've approved them, making this a one-time process. You can also manually link a name to the contact you're viewing. We wish the Twitter extension were as smoothly integrated as the Facebook extension, which takes no legwork at all.
But if you do take the time to set up Twitter for some contacts, you'll be rewarded with a more intimate portrait of people in your casual and business circles. Instead of just a name, you might also see a face, a Skype number, and, with Twitter, a sense of your contact's personality and interests. Even if you're not attempting to humanize people you've never met in real life, Xobni's Twitter integration can also be a convenience tool that lets you post a tweet without having to close or hide Outlook.
While Twitter in Xobni covers the major bases, it won't replace dedicated desktop apps for heavy-duty tweeters. For that, see our roundup of five desktop Twitter helpers.
The latest update--Xobni 1.8.3 build 8559--also includes back-end adjustments to improve search speed, Windows 7 compatibility, and a handful of other tweaks and big fixes.
Last February, I described losing half my iPhone contacts after an iTunes sync. Even though I tried the Filadex Web-based contact manager, I don't like the fact that the information is stored unencrypted on Web servers.
More importantly, my iPhone always has my most up-to-date telephone and address contact list, while Gmail knows more about my e-mail correspondents than the iPhone does, and Google Calendar is my primary scheduler. Just to complicate matters, I spend most of my workdays (and some weekends, unfortunately) in Outlook.
I need to export my Google Calendar and Gmail addresses to Outlook and my iPhone, and move my iPhone telephone numbers and physical addresses to Gmail and Outlook. Simple, right? Well, it turned out to be not too difficult or time-consuming, although the result was a bit messy.
Sync Google Calendar with calendars in Outlook and the iPhone
Who knew Google Calendar and Outlook could play so nice? The aptly named Google Calendar Sync does the trick with just a few clicks and a minimum of thumb-twiddling. The program works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 on XP and Vista PCs, though it doesn't support 64-bit XP, according to Google.
After you download and install the program, you enter your Google ID and password and choose one of three options: sync from and to Google Calendar and Outlook; sync from Google Calendar to Outlook; or sync from Outlook to Google Calendar. The default sync time is 120 minutes, and the minimum setting is 10 minutes; there's no mention of a maximum setting. The sync begins after you click Save.
Choose two-way or one-way sync between Outlook and Google Calendar in the Google Calendar Sync utility.
(Credit: Google)Up-and-down arrows on the Google Calendar icon in the notification area indicate a sync in progress; hover over it to see the percent complete or the time of the last sync.
The program converted my relatively simple Google Calendar to Outlook 2007 with surprising accuracy. In fact, the two calendars appeared and acted very much alike. Keep in mind, I didn't transfer any tricky repeating appointments, invitations, or time-zone changes. But for my meager calendar needs, the sync was fast and comprehensive.
To sync your Google Calendar and Gmail contacts with an iPhone, simply use the phone to create a Google Sync account. Instructions for OS version 2.2 and 3.0 are on the Google Mobile Help site.
Unfortunately, Google Sync is limited in the fields it supports and doesn't let you exclude entries or deal with duplicates. These and other of the program's limitations are described on the Google Sync Help page.
Move your iPhone contacts to Gmail and Outlook, or vice-versa
Use iTunes to export your iPhone contacts to Outlook--and Gmail, if you choose not to go the Google Sync route described above. Plug your iPhone into your PC, choose the device in iTunes' left pane, and select the Info tab. Pick either Outlook or Google Contacts in the "Sync contacts from" drop-down menu. (Yahoo Address Book and Windows Address Book are the other options.) For Outlook, you can choose which groups to sync. For Gmail, you enter your user ID and password.
Your only sync options are to merge or replace the entries iTunes identifies as duplicates, and to choose between two entries pegged as conflicts. The resulting sync was full of double entries, but I would much rather deal with manually merging the dupes than losing the information either entry contains.
iTunes' sync with Google Contacts provides few options for dealing with duplicate entries.
(Credit: Apple)I'll probably spend another hour or so cleaning up the extra entries created by the contact sync, but that's much less time than I'd spend trying to replace the info.
A few months ago, CNET Editor Rafe Needleman lauded Xobni, an e-mail search plug-in for Outlook, but wondered where the money would come from to keep the company afloat. On Tuesday night, Xobni responded with a version update, Xobni 1.8, and the introduction of a new premium service, Xobni Plus.
The free version of Xobni 1.8 features a slightly revamped interface that loads faster thanks to a switch from a slightly draggy custom UI (built using C#) to HTML rendering. More important to most users, Xobni's sidebar has gotten richer on the whole, searching the subjects of e-mail attachments in addition to contacts and messages, and stuffing more details into the pop-up box you see after hovering over an item. Xobni now also displays thumbnails of Facebook images in the search results in addition to the profile screen--but you'll only see these for contacts who have enabled third-party extensions in their privacy settings.
You also can't fail to notice that a new Google search bar at the bottom of the sidebar replicates the contents you type into Xobni's search. If you launch Google's search, Xobni will open the results in a new browser tab. You can hide the feature in Options to reclaim more screen space.
These new features, while nifty additions for regular Xobni users, are dwarfed by those introduced in Xobni Plus. The one-time fee of $29.95 for one computer (and $9.95 for each additional) gets you search access to appointments and your Outlook task list. It also opens up the search bar to let you search phrases in quotes or type in Boolean search terms. A new Advanced button flanking the search bar lets Plus users build granular searches for contacts and messages, including flagging e-mails with attachments. This Advanced button is also visible in the free version as a marketing tool, but won't be operational.
Searching the full text in a conversation is another useful, often-requested feature that takes life in Xobni Plus. (The free version will let you see conversations and filter e-mails by subject, but does not provide a filter for full-text search.) Another filter helps you wade through bulky e-mail threads by stripping out all but the direct messages. Then there's this subtle, but terrific, help: Xobni Plus adds its index of incoming and outgoing e-mail addresses to the To field of every message you compose. Even if Outlook hasn't captured the sender's info, you'll be able to quickly e-mail them without hunting through your in-box for their address.
Advanced search and the thumbnail search result are two additions to Xobni Plus.
(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)Xobni continues to handily and speedily find messages and contacts. Searches still aren't instantaneous, especially if you're working from a bloated in-box, but they're zippier than Outlook's default. Our greatest complaint is that Outlook's program window must be enlarged for you to see many of these new features. Since the profile window in Xobni's sidebar doesn't give you a scroll bar, people who work with Outlook condensed into a small window may miss the extra features until they expand the application interface.
Xobni 1.8 is free for use, but will have some features, like Advanced Search, disabled. You can use Xobni Plus free for 14 days. Get started by activating Xobni Plus from the sidebar (you can't miss the prompts) and scrolling to the bottom of the sign-up page.
I have thousands of e-mail messages in my corporate Outlook in-box, and thousands more in Gmail and in my ancient Hotmail account. MailStore Home is a free program that can archive them all locally, and display those archives in an interface that reads like your Outlook in-box.
Why use it? You can clear away old messages and attachments, but easily search to find them again when that inevitable moment arrives. Until universal offline in-boxes like Yahoo's Zimbra Desktop start addressing consumers on a wider scale, MailStore Home is also a good way to read mail offline in areas of spotty Wi-Fi, or to use as a de facto message backup.
MailStore Home's search pane includes attachments and repeat queries.
(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)MailStore Home can archive a pretty impressive list of accounts and protocols, including Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Microsoft Exchange, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Gmail, Windows Live Mail, IMAP, POP3. It also supports .EML files. It largely resembles Microsoft Outlook's layout with a side bar on the left--complete with folder tree and search field--and a large reading pane on the right. There are also some small navigational icons along the top that you can use to jump to archiving, burning archives to disk, advanced search, and tools.
The program's management is straightforward. Buttons on the start screen replicate the navigational icons up top, and there are also some stats, like your oldest and newest messages and the total size of your archive. When you archive an in-box, a wizard walks you through special configuration steps and lets you enter folders to archive or exclude if you want some backed up, but not all. MailStore Home skips your spam, trash, and junk folders by default, and it checks for duplicate messages while going about its business.
E-mail search is one feature of note. Using the advanced search screen, you can drill down to specifics--dates, folders, even the contents of e-mail attachments. You can also search for messages with or without attachments, and save queries to rerun the report at a later time. MailStore Home supports Boolean search terms. When you've found your message, you'll have management options like opening, saving, and exporting. Search was speedy and accurate in our tests. Though processing took a few long seconds, we were able to reply to archived Gmail messages via Outlook.
The freeware version for consumers doesn't do it all. There's no auto-archiving or scheduling for starters, so archiving is a manual activity. Initial scanning also takes a long time, and subsequent archives of the same in-box (click "run" to rearchive) start over from scratch instead of offering you the option to pick up from the most recent message date. We'd like to see more, and more nimble, filters on that left sidebar, like to filter only e-mails with attachments. MailStore Home also restricts you to three account profiles, which isn't especially useful if you've got more active accounts than that. Despite these drawbacks, MailStore Home offers a fine free solution for storing e-mail from multiple in-boxes and searching through the archives.
Related story: Three killer Outlook add-ons for office workers
It's too bad that add-ons for Microsoft Outlook haven't caught on with the intensity of Firefox extensions. The good ones can save as much time for office workers who live and breathe by the in-box as a browser extension can enhance the power of your Internet experience. I wouldn't recommend loading up on dozens of Outlook add-ons--they could slow Outlook's performance--but here are three I find useful (and light enough) for daily use.
The visual Xobni can help quickly find e-mail and contacts. Seeing a Facebook image can also help humanize a stranger.
(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)Xobni
With its hint of bubble gum visuals, Xobni is a free Outlook add-on that quickly searches through your e-mail. Just as Xobni's name comes from spelling 'in-box' backwards, so does its search philosophy, which is all about contacts. Finding contacts and message subjects routinely takes a fraction of Outlook's chugging.
Without ever using up more than three-quarters of the reading pane (and often much less when you collapse it,) Xobni can reply, forward, or open a message, or even a file. Its ability to throw in public information scraped from Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, and Hoovers can add extra context. Dataheads will be intrigued by the stats analyzing your e-mail relationship with the contact, including the rank assigned to your most frequent correspondents. The analytics haven't figured much into my usage, but the Facebook pictures and quick-find searching do. Every day.
Gwabbit ingests details from the signature block into Outlook's address book.
(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)Gwabbit
I'll admit that I wasn't initially a huge fan of Gwabbit ($19.95), and it showed (I initially called it "weally wame.") Perhaps I was too harsh. This Outlook add-on scours the signature block in an e-mail and creates from it a full contact record in Outlook's address book, going far more in-depth that Outlook does when you attempt to perform the same function by right-clicking a contact's name. Business users who volley e-mail back and forth with unknown recipients will find Gwabbit to be a savvy way to fill in the digital Rolodex.
If you followed the steps in my post from August on merging your Outlook and Gmail contacts, you may have ended up with duplicates in your contact lists. Microsoft's advice for deleting duplicate contacts is to sort them by the date modified, Ctrl-select the ones you want to remove, and press delete.
The problem is, the duplicate entries probably aren't identical, so you're almost certain to delete some data along with the dupe. What you need is a way to merge the information in the duplicate contacts. There's no such feature in Outlook, but if you're willing to spend $30, you can make short work of your extraneous Outlook entries by running 4Team's Duplicate Killer for Outlook.
The program deletes or merges duplicate e-mail messages, calendar entries, tasks, and notes in addition to contacts. I tested the program with Outlook 2007 but, according to the vendor, it works with Outlook 2000, XP, and 2003 as well. The new version, 3, is said to work with "Microsoft Exchange type folders including public folders," according to the vendor's Web site, but I ran it on a standalone Outlook installation.
... Read more
Improving Outlook is no easy feat given that it's notoriously anti-social when it comes to social networking. The free Outlook plug-in iLook Social and Outlook tries to make Microsoft's ubiquitous e-mail client a bit more sociable by including souped-up searching and filtering, Skype integration, e-mail controls, content and attachment exporting, and Facebook support.
Highlighted in red, the iLook Social and Outlook plug-in gives Outlook users more networking features.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)For a sidebar pane, it's a good list of features with an interface that integrates smoothly into Outlook 2007. Desktop e-mail clients are going to have to adapt to social networking far better than they have to survive, especially if the future of e-mail is Google Wave. Postbox does a decent job of remixing Thunderbird for social networking, but it's still in beta and lacks the calendaring you can get in Thunderbird using the Lightning plug-in. While iLook's features are worthwhile, their execution leaves plenty of room for improvement.
The search and Skype features are the strongest, but could still be better. Boolean searches are not supported, nor are cross-folder queries, and the nature of Outlook requires you to manually create a new search results folder that iLook doesn't address. Basically, that means you've got to figure out where your search results are going to go before you see what they are--it's counter-intuitive.
The Skype support is strong, with decent chat quality, contact list support, and other Skype features. Like any third-party Skype plug-in, though, it requires Skype to be running, and iLook wouldn't load if Skype was running before Outlook loaded. The Facebook support was far less convenient than it should've been to convince users to utilize it in iLook. Attachment exporting worked well, but that was more of an alternate path up the mountain than introducing a whole new geography to Outlook.
Making use of the entire iLook experience, unfortunately, will put you in for a bumpy ride. Although Outlook itself isn't known for its speed, this plug-in definitely slows it down. Switching between its features often causes error messages, and it's hard to tell if or how those errors affect either iLook or Outlook. The features that iLook Social and Outlook provides are smart choices, but the end experience is buggy and needs to be tightened before it can be considered for daily use.
After making a splash helping Windows users quickly search for conversations and contacts in their endless Outlook in-boxes with Xobni, the e-mail organizer company shared its plan on Monday to make the same service available for BlackBerry.
Xobni wouldn't elaborate on any program details, like how exactly it will look and work on the BlackBerry, but they did say that it will involve integration with the phone's address book.
"The app will be focused on contact and relationship management and bring a lot of the relationship features people like from Xobni in Outlook to the BlackBerry," added Xobni's co-founder, Matt Brezina.
If I were to take a stab at what's in store, I'd guess that Xobni's BlackBerry debut will include the Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, and statistics information found in Xobni for Windows. The emphasis on relationship management rather than e-mail organization and search hints that shortcutting to e-mail messages from your BlackBerry contact list isn't an immediate part of Xobni's mobile plan--but we just don't know.
What we do know is that Xobni's BlackBerry version is expected to be available sometime in the summer. It won't be tied to corporate policies, and the download will be available through BlackBerry App World. It's not yet clear if the app will be compatible with phones whose operating systems predate version 4.2 of the BlackBerry device software.
Until more details trickle out, you can sign up in advance here.
