Work the People pane and Outlook Social Connector
As social networks become an increasingly important way for people to communicate with one another, email is losing its place as the center of electronic communications. The Outlook Social Connector built into Outlook 2010 is an attempt to meld the power of social networks with email.
The Outlook Social Connector presents its information via the People Pane, which is new to Outlook 2010. The People Pane is normally minimized; to expand it, click the expand arrow at its right edge or else drag up the top of the minimized pane to whatever size you want. (You can also turn off the People pane via Outlook's View menu.)
The pane serves as a central point for all of your communications with anyone in Outlook. Highlight an email in any folder and you'll see a list of all the recent communications between you and the sender or receiver of that email, including emails, meetings, attachments and more.
You can filter to see just one type of communication -- for example, only emails or only status updates -- by clicking on icons on the left side of the pane. To view details about any communication, click the item and it will open in a separate Outlook window.
The Outlook Social Connector enhances the People pane by pulling in your connections' LinkedIn and Facebook information so that you can easily keep track of their activities without having to go to those sites. You'll have to log in to those social networking services from the Outlook Social Connector first, of course.
The Outlook Social Connector links to social networking sites including Facebook and LinkedIn, and displays details in the People Pane. The "Fellow at Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship" title, for instance, is pulled in from LinkedIn. Click to view larger image.
The Social Connector also adds a new Contacts folder composed only of your LinkedIn contacts, even if you haven't added them to your normal Outlook contact list. (It doesn't do this for Facebook.) Double-click a contact to see all of his or her LinkedIn status updates and messages. To visit the LinkedIn page of any contact, click the Web Page address.
As useful as the Outlook Social Connector is, though, it's only half a solution, because it doesn't allow for two-way communications -- you can't update your status on social networks from inside Outlook. It pulls information in but can't push information out.
Follow the conversation with Conversation View
Previous versions of Outlook included a feature called Conversation View that grouped together messages in an email thread. The idea was to make it easy to follow continuing email conversations with one or multiple people, but it was so awkwardly designed that it was of little use.
Outlook 2010's updated Conversation View greatly improves the experience. To turn it on, check the "Show as Conversations" box on the View tab of the Ribbon. Now every email that has more than one message in a thread has a small triangle to the left in the Inbox or any folder list. Click the triangle to see a reverse-chronological list of every message in the conversation; click any message to jump to it.
Each conversation thread in Outlook 2010 includes messages you've sent as well as those you've received, making it simple to follow entire conversations. You'll no longer have to hunt through your Sent Items folder in addition to your Inbox or another folder to follow a single conversation.
Outlook 2010's Conversation View adds messages you've sent to threaded email conversations.
Click to view larger image.To hide all the messages in a conversation again, just click the triangle at its top left. And you can customize how Conversation View works by clicking the Conversation Settings button on the Ribbon's View tab. In the drop-down menu that appears, you can change how conversations are displayed -- for example, by always opening each conversation with all its messages expanded.
Making Outlook 2010's Conversation View even more useful are a couple of new features for managing your conversations. The Clean Up feature sweeps through a conversation and deletes any messages that are redundant. Having fewer messages per conversation, with every message being relevant, is a big time-saver.
To use Clean Up, highlight a conversation and click the Clean Up button on the Ribbon's Home tab. From the drop-down list that appears, you can choose to clean up the conversation, the entire folder or the folder and all of its subfolders.
The Ignore feature is also useful, but it needs to be used with care. Highlight a conversation and click the Ignore button on the Home tab, and the entire conversation will be deleted. Additionally, all future messages in that conversation will automatically be routed to the Deleted Items folder.
As in Outlook 2007, you can easily assign a category to an entire conversation. To do it, right-click the small triangle that expands or contracts a conversation; in the menu that appears, choose Categorize and select the category to which you want to assign the conversation. When future messages in the same conversation arrive, they'll be assigned the same category automatically.
There is one anomaly about Conversation View that may take some getting used to: It groups together all messages with the same subject line, and so at times puts unrelated messages in the same conversation. For example, if you've used the subject line "Long time, no speak" with several different people, it will group all of those messages from separate conversations into a single conversation.