for: Outlook Express

Microsoft Outlook or Outlook (full name Microsoft Office Outlook since Outlook 2003) is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite.

Although often used mainly as an e-mail application, it also includes a Calendar, Task Manager, Contact Manager, note taking, a journal and web browsing.

It can be used as a stand-alone application, but can also operate in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to provide enhanced functions for multiple users in an organization, such as shared mailboxes and calendars, Exchange public folders, Sharepoint lists and meeting time allocation.

Versions

Outlook replaced Microsoft's previous scheduling and mail program, Schedule+ and Exchange Client.

Versions of Microsoft Outlook include:

Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000 could be installed in one of two configurations:

• Internet Mail Only or IMO mode: A lighter application mode with specific emphasis on POP3 accounts and IMAP accounts and including a lightweight Fax application.

• Corporate Workgroup or CW mode: A full MAPI client with specific emphasis on Microsoft Exchange accounts.

Microsoft also released several versions of Outlook for the Apple Macintosh; however, most mail features were disabled after Office 98. After Office 98, Entourage replaced Outlook on Macintosh systems, although in 2001 Microsoft released Outlook 2001 for Mac to allow Classic users to access Exchange servers. Over the past few years, Microsoft has improved Entourage to provide Mac users with a Mac OS X-compatible Exchange client, though it does not have the entire functionality provided by Outlook.

Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 was available in retail stores at the end of January 2007. A trial is available for download on Office Online. New features in Outlook 2007 include:

• A to-do bar added to the shell UI that shows a snapshot of the user's upcoming appointments and active tasks for better time and project management.
• Improved calendar views that display the tasks due below each day on the week view and supports overlaying multiple calendars.
• Integrated RSS aggregator
• 'Instant Search' through a context indexer based search engine with Windows Desktop Search
• Enhanced integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server
• New programmability features
• Ability to publish calendars in Internet Calendar format to Microsoft Office Online or to a WebDAV server
• Preview Handler extension for previewing email attachment without leaving Outlook

HTML rendering

Outlook 2007 was the first Outlook to switch from Internet Explorer HTML rendering to Microsoft Word 2007 HTML rendering. This means HTML and CSS items not handled by Word are no longer supported. On the other hand, HTML messages composed in Word will look more or less as they appeared to the author.