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Microsoft recently gave the first public preview of its upcoming Outlook 11 e-mail client software, and several technology managers said they liked what they saw.

The features that Microsoft showed off would answer some of the most pressing needs of Outlook users, according to attendees at Microsoft's MEC 2002 conference in Anaheim, California. Outlook 11 is to include a redesigned user interface and new capabilities for threading, sorting, and caching messages when it ships next year, likely in the same time frame as Office 11.

Mail Management

Jason Loster, a corporate IS administrator at Manitoba Public Insurance, said the capability to cache messages locally will let the auto insurer's 1400 Outlook users continue to access their e-mail after a server crashes.

Loster also said he likes the Outlook 11 user interface, which moves the incoming message window from the bottom of the screen to a column in the center that provides a screen-length view of messages. "Our users don't like to scroll down to read messages," he said. "They want to know why they can't see more."

Lori Woods, a computer specialist and e-mail administrator at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said new capabilities for sorting messages by size should make it easier for the agency's 7000 Outlook users to keep their in-boxes from filling up.

USDA users are limited to 20MB of e-mail messages, Woods said, adding that deleting large messages will be a more intuitive process in Outlook 11. The size-sorting function and other, more user-friendly features promised by Microsoft for Outlook 11 should also reduce workloads for the USDA's help desk staffers, Woods said.

Outlook 11 is scheduled to ship in mid-2003 as part of Microsoft's Office 11 suite and in conjunction with an upgrade of the company's Exchange e-mail server code-named Titanium.

Simplify, Simplify

Jensen Harris, lead program manager for the Titanium upgrade, said many of the changes coming in Outlook 11 were designed to simplify the software for users. For example, Microsoft is trying to give the new Outlook user interface a more efficient layout with added space for displaying messages, Harris said.

Ric Crowe, an Exchange messaging administrator at Boeing, said the offline caching feature and a new tool for flagging important incoming messages should be big pluses for end users at the aircraft maker. The additions that Microsoft is building into Outlook 11 should result in "a far better product" than earlier versions of the software, Crowe said.

Microsoft also gave an early glimpse of a module called XSO, being developed separately from Outlook 11. Company officials said the module will let Web pages work seamlessly with Outlook so information can be automatically entered from a participating Web site directly into a user's Outlook calendar.