Full Review: Outlook 2002
By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews
In its 2002 incarnation, Microsoft Outlook remains one of the most powerful and productive--as well as frustrating, complex, and inconsistent--personal information managers on the market. Although Microsoft has put less into it than we had hoped, the company has paid a lot of attention to how Outlook fits in with the rest of the suite (as opposed to how the rest of the suite fits in with Outlook) and has begun to remedy existing problems.
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There isn't one feature we can latch on to and say, "This is really the key upgrade the company has made to the product." There are, however, a lot of small things that make the program work more smoothly on a day-to-day basis. AutoComplete addressing for email takes some of the tedium out of those endless email days. You can now choose which email account to send from on a message-by-message basis. Outlook now supports DAV-compliant HTTP-based email, and Microsoft has finally done away with the annoying installation modes (corporate workgroup or Internet mail only); it's all one big happy application now. And there's a nifty Group by Sender view in email. We also have to admit that the new single-dialog reminder pop-up has made remote operation much easier: No longer are we faced with a screen full of reminder pop-ups every time we launch Outlook.
Although Microsoft claims it's made performance improvements for working over WAN and dial-up connections, it's the new reminders and the ability to track the progress of and cancel remote synchronisation that contribute most obviously to the perception of better performance.
Corporate users on Exchange will be able to take advantage of the Group Scheduling function, which lets you create your own groups rather than rely on IT to create them for you. Individuals can share free/busy information with anyone via the Web--as long as you sign up for a Microsoft Passport account.
Microsoft has also brought some of the more useful features to the surface. For instance, you can now select folders to search across in the basic Find (as well as Advanced Find). Furthermore, when using Word as your email editor--now the default--you have access to a lot of the time- and labor-saving new features in Word.
The way Microsoft has implemented some of Outlook's features drives us nuts, however. Take the new colour-coding rules in the calendar. This would be a useful little feature if it didn't take a doctorate to grasp how it works or if the program provided better documentation. At first, we thought that the coding rules just weren't replicating across machines. We finally figured out that the rules were associated with specific views rather than universally applied. That's fine--it's more powerful that way. But there's no way to copy rules from one view to another; you must either recreate them from scratch or recreate your existing views from scratch by basing them on views with existing rules. This seems a bit much just to get colour coding.
Another little piece of insanity is the search engine. You still can't search across different message stores, such as an Exchange-based mailbox and an offline mailbox, from within Outlook. You can, however, do so (using the new Search Pane) from within any of the other Office applications. In fact, with the exception of Document and Application Recovery, which we never had any reason to use in Outlook (though we certainly did use it in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), there are very few of the new Office XP-wide features here.
If we seem to be nit-picking, it's because Microsoft only gave us nits to pick. There's a lot we were hoping to see: an approach to forms that's more friendly to end users, more control over printing parameters, recordable macros, improved import and export, the ability to display items flagged for follow-up on the calendar or task pad, an email polling log (to indicate the last time each email account was checked), customisable rules for default reminders, and so on.
Although it lacks any new marquee features, the latest version of Outlook has many small enhancements that make a good product even better. Unfortunately, many of the little things that frustrate us are still there, too.
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