outlook

OrgScheduler is an attractive and intuitive schedule management program that is a pleasure to use. Although it is not crammed with extra features, it does the basics very well and has a few cool extras to boot.

We loved that OrgScheduler's interface is so clean and intuitive, yet offers users plenty of options. The options for viewing the calendar alone are impressive, with vertical and horizontal views, daily calendars with increments as small as 5 minutes, quarterly and annual views, and quite a few others. However you like to look at your calendar, OrgScheduler can accommodate you, and will … Read more

Last February, I described losing half my iPhone contacts after an iTunes sync. Even though I tried the Filadex Web-based contact manager, I don't like the fact that the information is stored unencrypted on Web servers.

More importantly, my iPhone always has my most up-to-date telephone and address contact list, while Gmail knows more about my e-mail correspondents than the iPhone does, and Google Calendar is my primary scheduler. Just to complicate matters, I spend most of my workdays (and some weekends, unfortunately) in Outlook.

I need to export my Google Calendar and Gmail addresses to Outlook and my … Read more

The Xobni Outlook add-on is at its heart a tool to search for and find e-mail and contacts faster. As an interesting, but far less crucial, secondary function, Xobni also collects statistics, like the frequency you e-mail a contact and at which hour, that can eventually help you manage your social relationships.

Visually, Xobni displays as an attractive sidebar that slides in an out from the right and over the reading pane. It features a Xobni search bar, faster-acting than Outlook's own by miles, and a Google search bar for more general queries. The search results pull up people, … Read more

A few months ago, CNET Editor Rafe Needleman lauded Xobni, an e-mail search plug-in for Outlook, but wondered where the money would come from to keep the company afloat. On Tuesday night, Xobni responded with a version update, Xobni 1.8, and the introduction of a new premium service, Xobni Plus.

The free version of Xobni 1.8 features a slightly revamped interface that loads faster thanks to a switch from a slightly draggy custom UI (built using C#) to HTML rendering. More important to most users, Xobni's sidebar has gotten richer on the whole, searching the subjects of … Read more

There's much to admire in this e-mail archiver that reads like your offline in-box, but searches stored files much faster than good-ol' Outlook. MailStore Home supports a long list of mail servers, replicating and backing up messages in a straightforward interface--complete with folder tree and reading pane. There's also a start screen to jump to archiving, burning archives to disk, advanced search, and administrator tools. Small navigational icons along the top of the app kick-start these tasks after you've left the start screen behind.

The program's management is straightforward. When you archive an in-box, a wizard … Read more

I have thousands of e-mail messages in my corporate Outlook in-box, and thousands more in Gmail and in my ancient Hotmail account. MailStore Home is a free program that can archive them all locally, and display those archives in an interface that reads like your Outlook in-box.

Why use it? You can clear away old messages and attachments, but easily search to find them again when that inevitable moment arrives. Until universal offline in-boxes like Yahoo's Zimbra Desktop start addressing consumers on a wider scale, MailStore Home is also a good way to read mail offline in areas of … Read more

It's too bad that add-ons for Microsoft Outlook haven't caught on with the intensity of Firefox extensions. The good ones can save as much time for office workers who live and breathe by the in-box as a browser extension can enhance the power of your Internet experience. I wouldn't recommend loading up on dozens of Outlook add-ons--they could slow Outlook's performance--but here are three I find useful (and light enough) for daily use.

Xobni With its hint of bubble gum visuals, Xobni is a free Outlook add-on that quickly searches through your e-mail. Just as Xobni's name comes from spelling 'in-box' backwards, so does its search philosophy, which is all about contacts. Finding contacts and message subjects routinely takes a fraction of Outlook's chugging.

Without ever using up more than three-quarters of the reading pane (and often much less when you collapse it,) Xobni can reply, forward, or open a message, or even a file. Its ability to throw in public information scraped from Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, and Hoovers can add extra context. Dataheads will be intrigued by the stats analyzing your e-mail relationship with the contact, including the rank assigned to your most frequent correspondents. The analytics haven't figured much into my usage, but the Facebook pictures and quick-find searching do. Every day.

Gwabbit I'll admit that I wasn't initially a huge fan of Gwabbit ($19.95), and it showed (I initially called it "weally wame.") Perhaps I was too harsh. This Outlook add-on scours the signature block in an e-mail and creates from it a full contact record in Outlook's address book, going far more in-depth that Outlook does when you attempt to perform the same function by right-clicking a contact's name. Business users who volley e-mail back and forth with unknown recipients will find Gwabbit to be a savvy way to fill in the digital Rolodex.… Read more

It's once again safe to fire up Windows Desktop Search if you're a Google Apps user.

Google's App Sync for Outlook allows fans of Outlook to keep the familiar interface even if their company switches to Google Apps on the back end, but it debuted with a flaw: Windows Desktop Search couldn't find e-mails created with the new software installed. Google got together with Microsoft to work on a solution to the problem--which must have made for a few interesting meetings--and a fix has been released, Google announced Tuesday.

There are a few other outstanding bugs, … Read more

Dave Greiner was distressed in 2007 when Microsoft decided to use Microsoft Word's relatively rudimentary technology to display HTML-encoded e-mail in Outlook. Now, facing the extension of that choice into the forthcoming Office 2010, he's agitating more loudly for change.

Greiner, a member of the informal E-mail Standards Project group, set up a Web site called FixOutlook.org and urged everybody who agrees with his position to publicize their dismay on Twitter; more than 19,000 did so by Wednesday afternoon.

Microsoft, while encouraging feedback on the matter, stood by its decision in a response published on the Microsoft Office Team blog. … Read more