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Preparing for the holidays with Outlook

It’s that time again; the last holidays of the year are coming up! If you are a planner, you probably have written your entire To-Do List in Outlook already, have scheduled all the family visits in your calendar and synchronized everything to your mobile device too; all things digital! ;-)

But why stop there? Outlook can be great to manage your list of Christmas cards to send out as well with the use of categories and a mail merge from your Contacts folder. Of course you can directly send a digital card from Outlook too but automating the addressing of envelopes for real cards can be done as well.

All the information you need and links to templates and images you can use can be found in this special Christmas guide.

Free e-book: “First Look: Microsoft Office 2010”

For a limited time, Microsoft Press is offering the e-book “First Look: Microsoft Office 2010” for free and without any required registration.

The main focus of this book is of course highlighting the new features in Office 2010. For Outlook that is for example, the new full-Ribbon-style interface, Backstage, the redesigned Conversation View, Conversation Cleanup, Quick Steps, the Social Connector/People Pane and the new Schedule View (which replaces the “Plan a Meeting” and “Group Schedules” feature).

Other applications that are being discussed are: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint Workspace (this used to be called Groove), Publisher and Access. In addition, some “better together” scenarios are being discussed as well as the security and permissions features that are introduced or improved throughout Office 2010.

Download: First Look: Microsoft Office 2010

Developer information about the Outlook Social Connector

If you have taken the latest Office 2010 Beta for a spin already, then you probably have noticed the Outlook Social Connector as well. Currently the only provider that can be used for this is a SharePoint server. Microsoft will later develop a Windows Live connector as well which allows you for instance to pull contact and related content information from Windows Live Messenger and SkyDrive. LinkedIn is also working on a provider for the Outlook Social Connector.

If you are a developer, you can create a provider for your own web service as well. You can find more information about it in this blog post of the Microsoft Outlook Team.

Office 2010 Public Beta now available too!

After official testers and MSDN and TechNet subscribers got their hands on the new test build of Office 2010, the Office 2010 Public Beta program has now become active as well. So as of now, anyone could get some hands on with Office 2010.

You’ll find that Outlook has gotten a major overhaul with the Ribbon now in the main program as well and a completely new Options dialog. If you have a hard time finding things, take a look at this guide which lists the locations of the most common options in Outlook.

The Outlook Social Connector is a completely new add-in which introduces “The People Pane”. This pane gives you some related information of the person you are in contact with or persons that have been added to the conversation. You can find out more about the Outlook Social Connector on the Outlook Team Blog.

More about the entire Office 2010 product line (which also includes Exchange and SharePoint) can be found here.

Download: Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta available

For all you testers out there; Microsoft has just released a new beta release of Microsoft Office 2010. Its build number is 14.0.4536.1000 which is a significant step forward of the 4006 Technical Preview release which had been available for some time now.
Currently it is only available to testers via Connect and people with a TechNet or MSDN subscription. A broader beta release available to everyone is upcoming as well and even expected this week.

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