When Microsoft took a $51 million stake in Groove Networks two years ago, the motivation was clear. Collaboration would be
one of the themes of the new decade; Office needed to become a more compelling platform for teamwork. Office 2003 attacks
the challenge not by splicing in Groove DNA, but rather by cobbling together a solution that enhances the core productivity
apps using SharePoint and the new Live Communications Server. The results are delightful in some ways, perplexing in others,
and mostly tangential to collaboration’s bread-and-butter application, e-mail.
Because e-mail is the key means of collaboration at nearly every company, let’s first zoom in on what Outlook 2003 brings
to the table. The new Outlook does present a more attractive and more capable user interface. The classic three-pane view
morphs, in this version, into a three-column layout that exploits today’s larger screens. As a result, it’s easier to scan
lists of messages, and you can read most messages without scrolling. For compulsive organizers, there’s a new way to group
messages: search folders. The usual foldering method — moving messages to folders, by hand or automatically via filter rules
— is still available. Search folders work, alternatively, as filters that collect pointers but leave the messages themselves.
The model takes some getting used to. You don’t move a message to a search folder, for example; you build a search expression
that causes the message to appear there. When you delete a message, it doesn’t just disappear from the search folder, it disappears
from its real location, too. A message in your inbox, or in another conventional folder, may appear in several search folders.
I like this new organizational tool, but wish that the expression builder it shares with Outlook’s advanced search feature
could tap into the XML data flows that the other Office applications can now produce. For that matter, why can’t Outlook produce
XML content and metadata, as Word, Excel, and InfoPath can? If the grand theme of Office 2003 is intelligent data, adding
XML smarts to the documents we most often read, write, and search for would seem an obvious first step.
Outlook’s built-in search engine is another area where I hoped for improvement but didn’t find any. It’s always been necessary
to rely on third-party solutions to index and search the local message store, and in Outlook 2003 that’s still true. The Outlook
team opted not to build a throwaway solution that would be obsolete by the next platform wave due in 2005: the Longhorn version
of Windows, built atop the Yukon database. But 2005 is a long way off, and full-text search isn’t exactly rocket science,
so this was disappointing news.
Outlook’s new user interface is spiffy, but it’s not a reason to upgrade. However, the overhaul of the plumbing that connects
Outlook to Exchange Server just might be. In this new version, Outlook’s messages, contacts, and calendar items are stored
locally by default, and synchronization with the Exchange server is handled far more gracefully than before. Locked in a client/server
embrace that began in the LAN era, Outlook and Exchange were previously ill-adapted to the fluid style of the modern worker
who begins writing a message at his or her wired desk, revises it in a Wi-Fi-equipped conference room, and sends it from an
Internet cafe. Outlook 2003 manages these transitions deftly.
When you’re stuck with dial-up access, you’ll appreciate these niceties: newest messages arrive first, you can defer some
or all message bodies, and you can bump up the priority of a deferred body or attachment. If you’re running against the 2003
editions of Windows Server and Exchange Server, you can also take advantage of RPC over HTTP, which tunnels Exchange traffic
through the standard SSL port. That means when you’re outside the firewall, you needn’t fire up a VPN connection just to sync
mail.
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