News

The Exchange team announced that Exchange Server 2010 has been released to manufacturing. So this means they are now working to general availability and the launch will be at Tech·Ed Europe in Berlin in early November.

The Outlook team has announced some changes in the way that add-ins will be handled upon closing Outlook 2010. This is to ensure that when a you close Outlook, Outlook will also exit as fast as possible.

Several changes to this behavior had already been made with Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2 but they will take it a step further in Outlook 2010. Especially when your add-in does anything important in the OnBeginShutdown and OnDisconnection methods of the IDTExtensibility2 interface or the ThisAddin_Shutdown method for VSTO add-ins, it is advised to read their guide and apply the necessary changes.

If you are a developer of add-ins for Outlook, also note that in order to support the 64-bit version of Office 2010, you’ll have to recompile your add-in specifically as a 64-bit add-in; 32-bit add-ins will not work on the 64-bit version of Outlook 2010.

As of September 1st, the old way of making a connection to Hotmail (via a protocol called WebDAV) has been discontinued. This means that as of now, when you are trying to connect to Hotmail via the build-in HTTP method in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007, you’ll get a “Forbidden” error.
The Outlook Connector is the new recommended method of connecting and can be downloaded here.

Several hotfixes have been released for Outlook 2007.

KB973404: Contains a big list of bug fixes including a fix for a printing bug that was reported via the newsgroups.

KB974489: Adds a new “Weekly Agenda Style” print style for the Outlook 2007 Calendar (File-> Page Setup).

KB973936: Fixes an issue where the calendar displays an incorrect date for Jewish Memorial Day.

Note that these hotfixes are not being offered via Microsoft Update. If you want to install any of the above hotfixes, you’ll have to request a download first (free). You can do this via the link at the beginning of the article. Updates that aren’t marked as “global” only apply to that specific language of Outlook; you cannot apply it if your language of Outlook isn’t listed.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) has been designed specifically to help meet the challenges of any business and the needs of all the different groups with a stake in the messaging system. Exchange Server 2007 SP2 is a mission-critical communications tool that enables employees to be more productive and access their information anywhere and anytime while providing a messaging system that enables rich, efficient access to e-mail, calendar items, voice mail, and contacts. For the administrator, Exchange Server 2007 SP2 provides advanced protection options against e-mail security threats, such as spam and viruses, as well as the tools to help manage internal compliance and high availability needs. For an overview of the new features that are available in Exchange Server 2007 SP2, see "What’s New in Exchange Server 2007 SP2".

Download: Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2

View: Release Notes for Exchange 2007 SP2

Exchange Server 2010 RC is now available for download.

You might have noticed it already; since this week HowTo-Outlook has a completely new Add-in section! Since its introduction, the add-in section basically hadn’t changed at all and the length and diversity of the list made it impractical to use.

The Outlook team is reporting on their blog that there are issues running the Google Apps Sync plugin with Microsoft Office Outlook.
The first one is that it disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing Outlook. The second issue is that it disables the Microsoft Outlook Connector.
Plugins from both Adobe and Apple are also affected by Google Apps Sync.

OutlookTools 2.2 has been released.

The wait is over; Office 2007 Service Pack 2 has been released today. After the KB articles for Office 2007 Service Pack 2 have been made public already earlier today, the download links for Service Pack 2 are now active as well.