E-Mail Meets Personal Information Management

Dave Andrews

There's good news for those of you who spend a good portion of your day creating and responding to e-mail: Microsoft's Outlook 97 integrates e-mail with common business applications such as scheduling, PIMs, and word processing. Slated to ship by the end of the year, Outlook 97 lets you juggle tasks such as scheduling, basic contact management, and task delegation in one place, under one consistent interface ( see the screen ).

Outlook 97 offers an immense number of new features. The primary benefit is that unlike Schedule+ (which this new program replaces), Outlook 97 provides a single store for e-mail and other information. For example, you can create an appointment in Outlook 97's calendar module by si mply dragging an e-mail message into the calendar. Another timesaving feature, auto-preview, help s you prioritize e-mail reading by displaying only the first few lines of a message. Remote users can download just the header and subject of a message before downloading all its contents.

Outlook 97 includes several form templates to let you automate expense reports, vacation requests, and other activities; you can also create forms. The intuitive rules-creation module, slated to ship shortly after Outlook 97, lets you automate message responses. Based on my experience with Outlook 97, it is a fine implementation of the next step in the evolution of e-mail.

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Where to Find

Outlook 97.............................Call for price

Microsoft Corp.
Redmond, WA
Phone:    (800) 429-9400 or (206) 882-8080
Fax:      (800) 727-3351
Internet: 
http://www.microsoft.com

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The Outlook is Good

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