organizers and address books

I use Outlook for managing tasks, contacts, mail and schedules. The new 2003 version is a vast improvement, at least in look and feel. The folder management is revised to split the window on the left to "favorite folders" and "all folders." Folders are a great way to organize and store emails, so this is a welcome change.

Then, the mail is organized by "today", "yesterday", and then the days of the week and back weeks. This helps to organize and trim out the inbox, which can get cluttered. For this attractive new feature alone, it's worth upgrading.

The look of the user interface is consistent with Windows XP, with the snazzy shaded bars. Nice to work with. Other improvements --the calendar also has been expanded, and tasks and contacts have new features, too. For example, the mail reading pane is larger, less scrolling required (yay!) and you can organize messages by subject thread to delete an entire series. Pretty cool.

If you are a dedicated Outlook user, the upgrade is well worth it, in my opinion.

I got Outlook '03 from a preview copy of Small Business Server 2003 and I can say it is worth the upgrade from ANY previous version (I am using Outlook XP now.)

It will be, however, the only office 2003 product I will upgrade from the time being.

Just the Anti-Spam feature (one of the best I haved used) is worth its price tag. I currently use "I hate Spam" (it sucks!) and Norton Anti-Spam (better but not quite there yet) but Microsoft's is more atune and I would say it works at a 90% efectiveness (it is very good indeed.)

Also, Microsoft finally got it that it is easy for everyday work to see your messages in readable date formats like "Yesterday" or "Last week." I mean, let us be honest, how many of us remember what day it is or how long you have left that mail from your accountant in the inbox folder?

Fonts are bigger in the message list and the preview pane has been moved to right hand side (from below) so now you have a complete view of the Folder List, Message List and preview pane. Nicely done.

Supposedly most of your Message rules (e.j. move all Jokes from Ed to the deleted folder) will now work on the server (not just on your machine) but I have not yet tried this one out. One thing that is just hands down the best thing Microsoft has produced this year is the new Outlook web access in their mail server 2003 software.

It will be really hard for you to distingish Outlook 2003 from this OWA. The difference between the new version and the previous one is like comparing windows 95 and Mac OSX. It also has much of the features of Oulook in the browser version as well, a highly missed feature in Exchange Server 2000's OWA. Do tear down your IT Manager's door until they get you this one. You owe it to yourself to try this one out (there is an public online trial version of OWA on microsoft's site by the way: exchangetrial.com).

That's it, now press one-click and enjoy.

Generally good, but two bugs remain from before:
1) Outlook PCS, which offers the only hope of exchanging with a PDA contact date organized into subfolders, is so buggy as to be unusable. A little effort by MS could make it great.
2) Appointments still get totally screwed up if you change time zones on the computer. Have to work around by pretending that you're in your home time zone when you travel, but just change the clock time.