I've noticed that a bunch of the referrers I get from google/msn/yahoo search to this blog are interested in terms such as "Email Notification Icon". So in response to that, today's blog entry is about two tricks related to the system tray, one...

Much has been made of Information Rights Management in Outlook/Windows 2003. But for years, organizations with 100% Outlook users have been capable of achieving a small level of the same functionality with custom Outlook forms. First, create...

My aggregator of choice is Newsgator , as it pulls my RSS feeds into Outlook which is where I'm already spending most of my day. If I didn't have Newsgator and has to use another program, I probably wouldn't read my feeds nearly as frequently as I...

#1: Show more months The default calendar view shows you many things: The appointments you have scheduled for the day(s) you have selected, your task list, and a date picker that shows one or more months on the calendar. If you want...

In OWA 2003, you can now create a message and fill in an address on the To field with a single URL: http://server/exchange/user/drafts/?cmd=new&mailtoaddr=user@domain.com To fill in multiple addresses: http://server/exchange/user...

http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/wotd.rss I  am subscribed to dictionary.com's word of the day feed. It's really useful... although today it is expropriating me of time. And yesterday, I became atrabilious after getting only 5 hours...

A discussion I had with some coworkers over lunch reminded me of another "dumpster trick" for Exchange: items deleted via IMAP can be recovered via the dumpster. I previously described the per-folder dumpster concept in September 26th 's blog entry...

In OWA and Outlook, we're always interested in how people manage their inboxes - how do users handle email overload? A few main strategies came out of our usability studies - that users tended to be "Pilers or Filers". Pilers tend to let all their...

There's a new capability in views in Outlook 2003 such that each message can take up two lines in the view, instead of one. Some people find that with the reading pane enabled on the right-hand side, this makes it easier to handle mail without ever...

By default, Outlook only displays reminders for four default folders: Inbox (for items flagged for follow up with a date for the reminder) Contacts (for flagged contacts, i.e. "call this guy") Tasks Calendar But if you...

Huzzah, huzzah, my list of the top ten tasks for new Exchange admins has been published on the Exchange web site: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/administration/beginner.asp . It was fun to write, because I only came up with the idea in...

For some reason, the "GNAP!" episode of the Smurfs has been in my head lately, so I went searching for more information on it just because I can . I ran across this review on epinions , which proved to be some entertaining light reading last...

New in Outlook 2003 is the ability to see what Exchange servers Outlook is connected to, as well as other details about those servers and how Outlook is connected to them. To view this data, hold down the CTRL key and right or left click on the...

I've been a fan of SIM games for years, SimCity being one of the first computer games I ever purchased with my own money. So a couple of years ago, I filled out an internal survey about my gaming preferences, checking the box to indicate that I enjoyed...

When you install Exchange 2003, two shortcuts will be added to Exchange's Program Files folder - one to the Exchange Technical Library, and the other to the Exchange Tools & Updates page. This is one of the steps that the Exchange team has taken...

Before I had Jared , I used to travel quite a bit. Outlook has a nice way of helping you keep the multiple timezones straight when you travel: 1. Tools | Options | Calendar Options 2. Time Zone 3. Click "Show an additional time zone", name...

A friend of mine works in the Anti-SPAM group here at Microsoft. When he joined the group, he was required to sign a disclaimer to signify that he was aware that in the process of doing his job, he might see pornographic and other possibly objectionable...

Starting with Exchange 2000 SP2, you can multi-select days in the calendar to get a side-by-side view of those days:

1. Select the calendar folder in OWA
2. Hold down the CTRL button
3. Click on up to 7 days (they do not need to be contiguous)

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This is something I use in Excel all the time, that I only found out about a year or so ago, so I thought I'd mention it here. Unfortunately, I don't know what version of Excel this first became available in. Get a quick count of the number of...

Megan, of The Screensavers fame, reports in her blog today that she is leaving TechTV to become a writer on a Microsoft website. Welcome aboard!

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Outlook 2002 and later has a feature whereby it will remember the item you last had selected in a mail folder. So if you have item #5 of 10 in your Inbox selected, and you switch to the Sent Items folder and then go back to the Inbox, item #5 will...

I try to keep this blog mostly technical, but I just need to say in public that my son rolled over for the first time a couple of days ago, at 4 months 1 week old. Way to go Jared ! Of course, he hasn't entertained us with this trick again, but I'm sure...

If you have an Intellimouse , you can use the buttons on the side of the mouse to navigate between folders you've already selected (they act like a forward/back button in Internet Explorer as well as Outlook): 1. Click on the Inbox 2. Click...

Use F6 to switch "panes" in Outlook (between the message view, folder list and reading pane, for example). And while you're in the reading pane, just keep pressing the spacebar to read all the messages in that folder with a single key.

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Did you know that our IT department publishes white papers on how they operate? http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/itsolutions/msit/Default.asp . Two exchange related papers were published in August.