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Microsoft Achieves Facebook-Outlook Integration

Doug Caverly — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:24:11 +0000

Checking one’s email and signing into a social network are similar acts, allowing a person to catch up with friends and colleagues. Microsoft’s latest move seems both smart and natural, then, as the company’s given Outlook users the option to integrate their Facebook and Windows Live experiences.

This opportunity is possible due to the Outlook Social Connector, which had already established ties between Outlook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Microsoft’s looking very well-connected in the social media space as a result.

Indeed, the latest Social Connector upgrade will allow Outlook users to interact with Facebook in all sorts of ways, from seeing pictures and status updates in real time to adding friends. And it even brings Outlook 2003 and 2007 – as opposed to just Outlook 2010 – into the game. So lots of data should be flying around.

Microsoft’s paid close attention to issues of privacy, though, taking steps to ensure that no one’s established preferences are disregarded. Don’t look for any investigations or protests to stem from this move.

An official document explained, "The information from a social network that is available in Outlook is shown based upon the person’s privacy settings for the social network. If the person has made any information available to you or publicly to everyone on the social network, then that information may also be seen in Outlook."

Otherwise, Microsoft said, "[O]ur goal is to help you stay in touch with the people you care about, and simplify your daily routine. . . . If you haven’t tried it yet, we encourage you to give the Outlook Social Connector a spin and share with us your thoughts and ideas."

LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties

Doug Caverly — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:24:20 +0000

Heavy users of LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook will soon have to do a lot less tab-toggling. Microsoft has introduced something called the Outlook Social Connector, and early next year, LinkedIn will become the first networking site to support it.

As you’ll see in a moment, the Outlook Social Connector is an accurately named offering. A post on the LinkedIn Blog explained that, with it, a user will be able to "[k]eep up with LinkedIn connections right from your email inbox." You can see a picture of what that’ll look like below.

Then comes click-saver number two: the ability to email LinkedIn contacts straight from Outlook. The Outlook Social Connector will create an Outlook Contacts folder with all of their info, and automatically fill in "to" fields when users start to type out people’s names.

Finally, while using Outlook, it’ll become easier to forge new connections. The post suggested, "Just click a button next to any e-mail you receive and instantly send an invitation to connect to the e-mail’s sender."

We’ll admit: there may not be a huge market for this sort of thing. But in certain sectors (HR, PR, etc.), the Outlook Social Connector’s tie-up with LinkedIn should come in handy, and will likely increase the profiles of both entities.

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Start Sending Notifications Not Emails

Rohit Bhargava — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:41:05 +0000

How much of the email in your inbox fits into the category of a person or company notifying you about something? If you are anything like me, it’s a lot. Amazon letting you know your product has shipped, or Google send you an alert telling you about a brand or URL mention, or someone confirming a meeting date or time. Part of the problem with inbox overload is that all these notifications come into your inbox, you read them and get the message, and then they sit around unless you are diligent about always deleting them. For me, that doesn’t seem like the best way to get all these notifications. Instead, I would love to see them in a stream as I can see updates from all the people I follow on Twitter. Or how I can see the activity of all my friends in my news feed on Facebook. In short, I’d love to subscribe to my own email.

The easy argument is that I already have that and that the real solution is to train myself to get better at reading and filing my email. Yet, if you think about it, many of the senders of this type of email could perfectly easily somehow "tag" their emails as notifications. I think of it akin to a self-destruct button on these emails – where as soon as they were read they would be filed or deleted (depending on what a user wants). An alternative could be, just like I can have a spam filter for my inbox, perhaps someone should create a notification filter. It would organize all my notifications together and send them to me any way I choose … as a stream, or as Twitter messages, or as text messages. These notifications could also come from sources that don’t typically use email, like when your name is on the wait list for a table at a restaurant or you are in the car shop waiting for your car to be serviced. My point is, notifications need a different category and method of delivery than just being lumped into email. Anyone out there seen or currently working on a notification filter or similar solution? I’d volunteer in a second to be on your beta testing team …

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Google Calendar Tries To Get Along With Outlook

Doug Caverly — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:32:03 +0000

Suppose you use multiple calendars; by manually copying events from one to another, you’re wasting time and moving towards having them memorized, anyway. So a new tool promises to sync Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar.

Google Calendar Sync, as it’s named, is supposed to sync calendars at intervals of your choice, and in either direction you please. On the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Matt Kulick adds, "You can set the default privacy level in Google Calendar to ‘private’ so events synced from Microsoft Outlook calendar are marked private, and only you (or others who you’ve granted permission to view event details) will see them on Google Calendar."

Google Calendar Help Page

The tool is available right now, and like most of Google’s offerings, is available for free. We feel obligated you warn you, though, that it may not work too well.

On Google Operating System, 20 comments follow an article on the matter. They’re not all negative, but several mention problems, and a few more suggest alternatives like Plaxo. On Google Blogoscoped, there are 14 comments, and some issues are also raised there.

Nothing appears to be catastrophically wrong with Google Calendar Sync, and no calendar events have been reported lost. Give it a try if you want; just don’t get too set on giving up the old copy/paste routine.

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector Beta Released

Darren Straight — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:32:18 +0000

With Microsoft Office Outlook Connector Beta, you can use Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail or Microsoft Office Live Mail accounts, including e-mail messages and contacts for free!

Outlook Connector Beta enables you to use your Live Hotmail accounts within Outlook:

Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.

Manage your Live Mail Contacts.

Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.

Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.

With a paid subscription, Outlook Connector Beta enables these additional features:

Manage, share, and synchronize your Windows Live Calendar in Outlook.

Access your Tasks and Notes.

Download Microsoft Office Outlook Connector Beta here.

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Kiss Your CSS Goodbye With Outlook 2007

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:21:27 +0000

HTML emails and CSS formatting will take a huge hit when Outlook 2007 starts taking up positions on millions of desktops, and email newsletter publishers will have to take some extra steps to ensure their creations render correctly. But even that isn’t a guarantee against problems with that new email program.

Kiss Your CSS Goodbye With Outlook 2007

There is a big change coming with Outlook 2007, which is only a couple of weeks away from a full consumer release. In the interest of security, Outlook 2007 will use the Word 2007 HTML parsing and rendering engine to display HTML emails, and not Internet Explorer.

It appears Microsoft wants to try and mitigate the threat to Outlook users that can arrive with a malicious message that exploits a condition in IE. Without IE accessible through Outlook, criminals can’t attack an IE exploit through Outlook.

A side effect of the things Outlook 2007 won’t be able to do includes delivering HTML emails as they have been created by their publishers. A post at the Site Point blog summarized how a lot of publishers are likely to feel:

Not only that, but this new rendering engine isn’t any better than that which Outlook previously used-indeed, it’s far worse. With this release, Outlook drops from being one of the best clients for HTML email support to the level of Lotus Notes and Eudora, which, in the words of Campaign Monitor’s David Grenier, “are serial killers making our email design lives hell.”

Microsoft’s changes in Outlook 2007 will mean publishers have to validate their code, and craft their publications to suit the available validator. That tool only works with a few Microsoft products like SharePoint, Expression, and Visual Studio, and with Macromedia’s Dreamweaver.

The Campaign Monitor blog listed a sampling of what Outlook 2007 will not support, and David Greiner’s post illustrated this by showing how one of their newsletters looks in Outlook 2007 and in Outlook 2000:

No background images – Background images in divs and table cells are gone, meaning Mark’s image replacement technique is out the window.

Poor background color support – Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.

No support for float or position – Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.

Shocking box model support – Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!

Microsoft lists the HTML and CSS support publishers will have available to them. Float and position are just two of several CSS properties that the Word 2007 engine will consider ‘unknown properties.’

That rendering engine also does not support animated GIFs or Flash. No Flash means that last part would be a showstopper for anyone trying to embed Flash video in a message, something some publishers may want to try given the escalating interest in online video content.

“Imagine for a second that the new version of IE7 killed off the majority of CSS support and only allowed table based layouts,” wrote Greiner. “The web design world would be up in arms! Well, that’s exactly what the new version of Outlook does to email designers.”

Microsoft has chosen not to make IE7 the rendering engine of choice. While that may look like a vote of no confidence in the IE& security model, it probably means something different.

The company does not want to negatively impact its big volume licensing customers who may have some kind of legacy application that is tied deeply into IE6 and its capabilities. If Microsoft were to force them to upgrade to use Outlook 2007, that could harm those big volume sales of Office 2007 licenses, aka Microsoft’s big revenue stream.

Instead of doing this, Microsoft has chosen to make things more difficult in the world of email publishing. Kiss that CSS goodbye, publishers and developers. Welcome to 1999.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

The Never Ending Spam War

Neville Hobson — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:11:09 +0000

If you’ve noticed a sudden upsurge in spam email in the UK recently, offering sex, stock tips, genuine fake Rolexes and the usual pharmacopia, it could be the result of criminal gangs using hijacked computers, says a Reuters report

I’ve been getting loads of such spams recently, all of which have managed to get through the spam filters on my email server. When they arrives at my PC, most get trapped by the excellent Cloudmark Desktop for Outlook, a pay-for service I’ve been using for over four years.

The ones that Cloudmark doesn’t see as spam are quite clever. They’re not obvious at all and on first glance apear to be normal-type messages. A closer look, though, and every single one is pure gobbledegook, as the small screenshot suggests.

Whatever the spam is, it’s undoubtedly becoming a serious problem:

[ email security company Postini] has detected 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November compared to 2.5 billion in June. Spam in Britain has risen by 50 percent in the last two months alone, according to Internet security company SurfControl. The United States, China and Poland are the top sources of spam, data from security firm Marshal suggests. About 200 illegal gangs are behind 80 percent of unwanted emails, according to Spamhaus, a body that tracks the problem.

My experience reflects these trends – on any given day, I estimate that at least 70 percent of all email I receive is what Cloudmark sees as spam, plus another 10 percent or so that I regard as spam.

This deluge goes beyond just being an irritant and a consequence of being online. Now, it takes longer and longer to sift through the stuff to see if there’s something trapped that shouldn’t be. Or, reviewing what’s in your inbox for something there that should have been trapped.

Who has the time? I now tend to simply purge the spam folder in Outlook without even reviewing what’s in it. When you see the folder containing 300+ items, you just go ‘select all – delete.’ (Likewise with spam comments and trackbacks on the blog that Akismet intercepts – whatever Akismet says is spam, I’m now accepting without reviewing.)

Will this problem ever be solved? It doesn’t look like it, certainly not any time soon:

[] It will only end when people stop buying diet pills, herbal highs and sexual performance enhancers, said Dave Rand, of Internet security firm Trend Micro. “The products they are selling by spam are exactly the same products that they sold in the Middle Ages,” he said. “This really is a human problem, not a computer problem.”

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Attensa Frees Its Client For Outlook

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:15:10 +0000

When Attensa coders were finishing changes to the 1.5 version, company marketing director Scott Niesen noted they felt ready to make the jump to version 2.0. That is now a free download from Attensa’s website.

“The beta program was focused on large corporate customers,” Niesen said of Attensa for Outlook 1.5. With the stability changes and improved administration capabilities coming along nicely, Attensa decided to skip the incremental number and round up from 1.5.

Having access to information being distributed through RSS has become more in demand from larger companies like ones that have been testing Attensa. Outlook has a dominant presence on many desktops in those enterprises, so that received the careful ministrations of Attensa’s developers.

Niesen said the logic of making Attensa work on Outlook was pretty critical. Having a stable product to work with the sometimes finicky email program proved paramount, but Niesen felt they had met that challenge.

Making the client freely available represents a change from the for-pay model Attensa used for the last version. Niesen is refreshingly candid about this. Attensa wants to build demand for their premium product, the Attensa Feed Server that we discussed in August.

One of the notable changes in the client comes from a particular need within some companies. Our recent coverage of the Podcast & Portable Media Expo showed a subset of the interest in netcasting, in audio and video formats.

Niesen said there are companies that have embraced these technologies internally, to distribute those creations within the corporate ecosystem. To meet that demand, Attensa has added a media player to their Outlook 2.0 client. That client currently supports Windows Media Format content, but Niesen said they plan to add support for other formats too.

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How To: Delay Emails In Outlook

Nathan Weinberg — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:07:39 +0000

There are plenty of good reasons to want an email to go out at a different hour than when you wrote it (the most obvious: to fake what hours you do work during). Lifehacker has the instructions for older versions of Outlook.

To do the same thing in Outlook 2007, after writing an email but before clicking Send, click the Options tab in the Ribbon, then click Delay Delivery in the More Options group on the right side. After that, the options are pre-selected for you, usually timing the delivery for the close of business today. Change the date and time to suit your needs, click Close, and enjoy your tomfoolery.

Now, how to I modify email headers to make an email look like I sent it earlier?

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Worthwhile Update to Office 2007 Beta

Neville Hobson — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 19:44:38 +0000

Microsoft released a public update yesterday to the Office 2007 beta 2 suite of applications.

Known as a technical refresh, the new build has bug fixes and includes better product integration, improved collaboration tools and “some general fit and finish changes,” according to a Microsoft spokeswoman as reported by Microsoft Watch.

As I’ve been using the Office 2007 beta 2 for the past few months, I’ve installed this upgrade. It’s a hefty download (over half a gig) as nearly every file in the beta it patches has changed. As the beta program has over 3.5 million testers in it, I would imagine Microsoft’s download servers will be very busy during the coming days.

Things I noticed immediately after installing and running just two of the apps – Outlook and Word.

Outlook runs a great deal faster than before. Not only was it a very slow application but it was also a memory hog. Memory usage appears to be better with this refresh. No visual changes that I noticed other than the application icon.

There is a known issue with Word (and probably other applications in the suite) and Norton AntiVirus with the tech refresh. If you have NAV installed, it’s very likely you won’t be able to open any Word document, which is what I experienced.

It’s to do with the NAV plug-in for Office which scans documents for macro virus infections. This plug-in may cause performance issues, the inability to open files within Office, or the inability to install some Office programs. Microsoft says:

[] Users running Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus Scanner may find they are unable to open Microsoft Office documents in the Beta 2 Technical Refresh due to the way the anti-virus application programming interface (API) is implemented in the technical refresh. Microsoft expects this issue to be remedied in the RTM version. All Beta 2 customers have been notified of this issue and can find additional resources on Microsoft Office Online.

Fixing it is easy although a kludge, ultimately requiring you to disable the NAV plug-in.

One feature I really did like in the original beta 2 that is no longer part of the suite (because of copyright issues with Adobe?) is the integrated PDF file-saving. If you want that functionality, you now have to download and install a separate add-in. That’s the first thing I did after installing this tech refresh.

There are some subtle changes in the Word menus, notably a bit of renaming and reordering of some of the commands you see in the Office button. Much easier to understand those now.

Plus you can now minimize the ribbon. While some people don’t like this ribbon at all, I do so don’t plan to be minimizing it. But at least you have a choice now.

In summary, I think it’s a worthwhile update, one that anyone using the Office beta 2 ought to install. If you’re not using the beta yet, you’ll need to install it before applying the refresh. The beta is no longer free – it will cost you a nominal $1.50.

Download the Beta 2 Technical Refresh.

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