InformationWeek

Microsoft's Outlook Shapes Up

By Sean Gallagher
Issue date: May 19, 1997

While intranet and Internet clients gain more groupware capabilities, Microsoft's Outlook messaging and groupware client has been improving as an Internet mail package. Microsoft has posted patches and enhancements on its Outlook Web site to correct some of the shortcomings of the client, which shipped with Microsoft's Office 97.

Outlook originally had problems formatting text to send by POP3-mail messages would go out without margins, and thus were difficult for users of other mail systems to read. That's been fixed in the Internet Mail Patch, now available in a test version.

Outlook can also handle multiple Internet mail accounts, so that mail from different servers and user IDs can be consolidated into a single in-box. Internet Mail's retrieval is a lot smarter now, too-it can leave copies on the server for a set number of days so users can keep mailboxes synchronized between systems while not accumulating piles of junk mail on their server in the process.

Another add-in for reading mail gives Outlook a three-pane interface-similar to that of Internet Mail and News and Netscape Commun icator. Instead of the first-line summary that Outlook provides in the message-list window, users can preview the whole message without opening it. Also available is a new Rules wizard, which adds client-side rules for handling messages not routed through Exchange.

The result is that Outlook has gone from being a decent proprietary groupware client with fairly kludgey Internet mail capabilities to a usable multipurpose client. Unfortunately, it's still missing a few handy pieces, such as IMAP mail access and LDAP directory support.

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