Outlook 2010

I have an MSDN subscription and decided to check out Office 2010 to see if there are any neat features in it.  So far I haven't been too impressed, but I did find a couple of improvements in Outlook that are pretty cool.

1.  I use the Unread Mail view in Outlook to keep up with new messages and when I opened it up this morning, I was surprised to see the messages grouped by folder.  This is pretty cool, because I have a bunch of rules setup and move messages to different folders trying to keep my inbox as clean as possible (currently at 6, but I'll take care of that this morning).  I don't remember this in 2007 (and I'm sure someone will tell me I could have changed my view... okay, I didn't think about it), but it is definitely helpful and better way of arranging my new messages.

2.  The coolest thing I saw so far in Outlook is you get a mini calendar view whenever you open an appointment request.  This one I actually showed to people in the office, so it did impress me.

I was always going back and forth between my appointment request and my calendar to see the conflicts or whatever is next to the time, so this is really helpful.

Another feature I did see, but haven't played with it yet, is you can group messages by conversation.  I keep a pretty clean mailbox and use Google desktop search if I'm looking for archive conversations, so I don't really see a need, but I'll check it out to see if it adds any value.  I think they stole this from Google, because I use it quite a bit with my gmail account, but my home e-mail is not as clean as my work.

Of course, with every Microsoft update, they did let a couple of escapes (defects found after GA) out the door.  The most annoying to me is I lost the 'online status next to the name' feature.  There is actually an option for this in the options menu, but it is checked and grayed out.  So even though it is checked, I don't see the Office Communicator online status next to the name in my messages.  Not a big deal, but something I liked and with it gone, annoys me. <9/16 - I applied the June and August cumulative updates for Office 2010 and the lastest OC 2007 R2 patches and this morning my OC status showed in my address list again.  They must have fixed something.>

The other thing is when I upgraded, it changed the tool bar order and I had to manually move my tool groups (btw... I'm not a big fan of the 2007/2010 tool bar... I think they are way too big and clunky).  Once again, not a big deal, but annoying.

Overall, I haven't seen the big splash I would expect from a major release, but I'll keep plunking away.  I think for Outlook, they are trying to integrate it more with social media, but I only use Outlook for work and stick to gmail for my personal stuff, so I don't see the need.  Hopefully I'll find something that makes me go Wow!, but for now, it is a nice to have, but nothing really special.