Outlook 2003 Benefits

Outlook 2003 can help you manage your time and information more effectively, while making it easier to create and share information with others. Overall, these changes provide a dial-up logon experience that’s almost 70% faster than Exchange 2000.

• Read e-mail messages more quickly. The Outlook 2003 Reading Pane displays twice as much content as previous versions of Microsoft Outlook, reducing the amount you need to scroll to read messages.

• Prioritize e-mail messages using Quick Flags to indicate a priority or time-sensitive messages.

• Save time spent rereading e-mail messages in threaded conversations. You can group all messages by subject line and then quickly scan or delete entire conversation threads.

• Find important e-mail messages immediately. Use Search Folders to save commonly used searches and then use them when you need them. Store the resulting messages in any folder, and still access them quickly. Search Folders require a connection to Microsoft Exchange 2003. We are not on Exchange at this time, but plan to be in the future. You can currently use Outlook to perform searches at any time, but are unable to save them.

• Help block junk e-mail messages (SPAM) from cluttering your Inbox with the new Junk E-Mail Filter in Outlook 2003.

• Use Outlook 2003 in different network environments. Outlook stays connected to a network even when you roam between different connections. Great for the wireless network on campus!

• Help protect your privacy. With Outlook 2003, you can choose when to include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) content in an e-mail message, which can help prevent unsolicited attachments from automatically returning information to the originating server. If spammers include a picture in an e-mail, they can tell you've looked at it, thus making sure they can send you more spam.

• Access resources while working on files. The new Research task pane can help you access electronic dictionaries, thesauri, online research sites, and proprietary company information while working in Office 2003 programs. Find information and incorporate it into your work quickly and easily.

• Outlook gives you more benefits for working with your new online mail folders. Copy whole folders around or drag message by message between your local and server folders. With Eudora, you can't move folders and must create the folder, then move messages one at a time or by highlighting and moving many at a time.

• Desktop new mail alert shows subject, sender, and first 255 characters of text; you can delete or flag from the alert itself .

• You'll be ready for calendaring in Outlook since it is the most likely solution to move to when our OnTime license expires. Don't have OnTime? Start using Outlook 2003 for calendaring now and you'll have all of your events ready to go. Synchronizing with the server based calendar will be a snap. We've developed a tool that will bring over all of your OnTime events as well so you won't miss an appointment. Since all users will be on the central calendaring system, everyone will be easier to get into a meeting, so you won't have to pull your hair out trying to track everyone down.

• Your existing Eudora folders and contacts import without a problem. You will have to redo your filters, however.

• Tie automatically into online search features so you can always get help to the questions you have.

• Use an enhanced contact list which will allow you to be able to add pictures.

• The Journal Viewer keeps a list of all Office documents you use so you'll be able to track items by file type or by date. You can also keep track of projects through their completion.

• You can use auto-complete in your e-mail. Do you find yourself typing the same thing over and over? Set something up once, and simply type a short phrase or sentence to have all of your text automatically entered.

• After a short training session you can use dictation to put text directly into Office 2003 applications. All you will need is a microphone and a short period of time to do the training. The more dictation that you do, the better the application will be at recognizing your voice.