Microsoft Outlook Express - Ultimate Manager

Microsoft Outlook is an ambitious program that integrates e-mail, address books, scheduling, and task management. In fact, you can organize your whole life with it!

Microsoft calls Outlook a desktop information manager. It’s in part aimed at users of personal information managers (PIMs), which organize contacts, calendars, and to-do lists in much the way that a pocket organizer notebook does. Outlook is also the preferred client for Microsoft Exchange Server — Microsoft’s enterprise e-mail and groupware solution — and can be used as the client for other sophisticated mail systems.

But Outlook is just as effective for the individual user who gets mail from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), keeps separate personal and family calendars, and communicates with family, friends, and colleagues on the phone, through the U.S. Postal Service (aka “snail mail”), or by e-mail.

KEY COMPONENTS

Outlook stores information in folders, using special forms to gather and display different types of data. It’s easy to see how everything is organized when you look at the graphic display of your expanded mailbox. One quick way to see this is to choose View, Folder List.

What you don’t see are the components that help Outlook keep everything in its place — the services, connections, and profiles. Throughout the book, we keep coming back to these key elements. Let’s introduce them, starting with services.

Services
Services define the kinds of messages you can send and how your address book is kept. Most of the services you need are included with Outlook, but you might also obtain some from independent sources (see “Keeping up with Outlook” later in this chapter).

If you are already using Outlook and want to see which services are currently at work in Outlook, choose Tools, Services.  (Another way to see the services is by choosing Control Panel, then the Mail and Fax applet.) We spend a lot more time working with services throughout Part I, as you learn how to configure Outlook to work just the way you want.

Connections
To send and receive e-mail messages, you need to be able to connect with other e-mail users. You can do this either through mail servers or, in the case of faxes, by linking directly with a fax machine.

Before you start using Outlook, you should know what kind of messages you plan to send and how you plan to make the necessary connections. For example, if you’re sending to colleagues in the same office, you’ll probably access an in-house mail server via the local area network (LAN). On the other hand, to send Internet mail from your home computer, you’ll probably dial in to an ISP. Most services need an account — that is, information that authorizes you to send and receive mail via a particular server.

Profiles
Information about your folders, services, connections, and accounts is organized into profiles, which also keep track of the way you’ve customized Outlook. Most profile settings can be managed through the Mail and Fax applet in the Control Panel.