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Beta1 Technical Refresh is Out!

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Now that Beta1 Technical Refresh (B1TR) has been released, so are many of the new pretty visuals. I thought I would post a few pictures of the new look with some comments of things of note. At first glance, you’ll notice that Outlook and the rest of Office are now more blue than gray. For more on the overall look of Office, see Jensen Harris’ blog post on A New Look for Office.

If you have installed B1TR and have used the Beta1 build, please reset your To-Do Bar .

Some highlights:

· The Date Navigator now has fewer borders

· New Item Row is now part of the task list.

· Category swatches are smaller and more rounded

· The flags are bigger and now change based on due date – the sooner the due date, the brighter the flag. (Look at the flags in the Daily Task List for comparison.)

· The X is less prominent and the minimize button is now on the right.

· You can now change the To-Do Bar settings (On/Minimized Off/Customize..) by right clicking on the To-Do Bar header or clicking on any blank space in the To-Do Bar or going to Tools->Options->Other… ->To-Do Bar options.

· The To-Do Bar is now off by default in the Calendar – but it persists per module, so you can have it on in Mail, but off everywhere else if you want, or vice versa.

· Many of the rendering problems in the Daily Task List have been fixed.

· The Daily Task List has been “prettied up” and it now has a button to minimize it.

The To-Do Bar

The Daily Task List

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    Well, Office 2003 (on XP with the default XP blue theme) has always been "more blue than gray."  The whole "blue menubars & toolbars" in 2003 was terrible (I got around it by using the Media Center theme; Office 2003 then used gray like the rest of OS & apps).  It's unfortunate to see the Blue theme extended even moreso in Office 2007.

    In XP Blue, blue is the color of your title bars, window borders, and taskbar.  Office's extension of this to "every UI element" is sad.

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    The Luna theme is just one theme - when used on Vista, the default is "Obsidian." We have not finalized this theme yet (we still have some work to do with Obsidian) but you can check it out by going to Tools->Options->Mail Formats->Editor Options and changing the theme from Luna to Obsidian.

    -Melissa

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    Ahhh... yes, the Daily Task List scrolling issue. This is a known bug that some how sneaked in just before the B1TR build and we are currently working on it. My apologies...

    -Melissa

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    RE: Outlook 2007 Categories, allow centralize contact and customer information that is captured across your entire organization. You can track and manage complete customer information including contact details, notes and history, appointments, to-do items, communications, documents and sales opportunities, so you increase productivity and stay organized.

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    Link Contacts to a Company, so when Company information is updated, it is automatically updated in each Contact record as well.

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2006
    RE: Outlook 2007, to add multiple contacts to a category would be nice.

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2006
    Thank you for your comments about contacts. I have passed your comments onto the appropriate members of the product team.

    Thanks!
    -Melissa

  • Anonymous
    March 18, 2006
    It would be really cool for the Outlook team to provide a few packages (i.e., "templates") of customizations for some of the more popular time management methodologies...

    For example, I can see how the new categories and flags can make implementing a Getting Things Done routine extremely simple.

    I'd also like to be able to configure a default reminder time for each flag and/or category. I like to schedule times to handle certain types of incoming email/tasks, and I have to click multiple times to set the category and then set a custom reminder time.

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2006
    Hi,

    I just want to drop a suggestion :

    - redesign "glass-Vista-like" icons on all the menus (drop the Office 2003 icons)
    - about the To-Do bar, change the design of the small calendar, with some glass effect it would be great !

    Maybe it's a bit angry, but I'm sorry, that's all I have to say at the moment because I am not a beta-tester.

    Thanks for reading.

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2006
    Hi Melissa,

    To be brief, there are my ideas:

    -new rule: when a user manually moves the item into a specific folder, it will by marked by a certain category
    -new view for a folder: quick access from context menu of a folder to see all outlook items in that folder (emails, tasks, appointments ...). Now it is possible from "All outlook items", but when choosing the criterion for a specific folder - I have to type the name of folder manually.
    - send mail: it would be good to have possibility to set a category for a mail, that I want to send and to define the folder, to which the mail should be moved in.  Of course to assign a contact.
    - new default fields for contact:  msn, icq, skype numbers … , so that the program (msn, icq, …) can find it in the contact
    -notes for email items:  to have o possibility to write some notes for sent and received emails  without using outlook notes or onenote notes. (just define new default field and include it to email form)
    -task from onenote: when creating task from onenote - to have possibility to set the category and folder of the new task
    - better category view - if there is a lot of categories - it's difficult to find a category (e.g. the size of the form for categories can't be resized, …)
    -onenote note  in outlook note folder: to enable to have in one folder "outlook notes" and shortcuts of "onenote notes" - they would exist side by side ->  in "All outlook items" I could see onenote note's shortcut side by side the other outlook items. For shortcuts there would be to edit additional information (date of creation, contact  assignment, …)
    -onenote notes for outook items. It should by already implemented but a can't see the button "onenote note" in outlook or is it going to be implemented in beta 2?
    -to be able connect all outlook items with each other. (like shortcut - but without inserting the shortcut e.g. to task ...)- something like manual definition of related outlook items (but not using category)
    -when assigned appointments to tasks - automatically calculate something like time of actual work for a task upon appointment's time
    -task: possibility to set start date of the task with due date set to none

    Questions:
    -are the categories saved within the .pst file? Are they preserved when reinstalling outlook (or whole operating system)?
    -what does the item on "task  form / details / update list" mean?

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2006
    Although I haven't installed the latest Beta 1 refresh of Outlook 2007 yet, I've already decided what...

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2006
    Can you figure a way to send a meeting request with multiple timeslots for the invitees to choose which one to accept? This is useful for scheduling training sessions that occur on different days so that invitees who cannot attend one session can have the option to choose other make-up sessions without having to re-send additional meeting requests to them.

  • Anonymous
    September 06, 2007
    Has anyone figured out a way to send a meeting request with multiple time options for an invitee to choose from?  This is very important to me sense our school is about to switch over from Outlook Express to Microsoft Outlook.  I only see one date/time that the requestor can offer.  Please help...I am about to have the school purchase an online account with agreeAdate.com to accomplish tracking meeting invites and their responses.  Any assistance yoiu can provide is most helpful.  I can be reached at jgneely@emory.edu.  Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    September 06, 2007
    Jennifer, One thought is that you could send an e-mail voting buttons with each of the different time options. Once you get a consensus, you could then send out a meeting request for the winning time slot. -Melissa

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    April 22, 2008
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