If you're using Outlook with Exchange, you'll appreciate the new cached Exchange features, especially if you travel with your computer. You no longer need to decide whether to connect to the Exchange server or to work offline. Instead, Outlook itself will keep your local copy of your mailbox synchronised with your server-side copy, and switch back and forth from one to another as dictated by the changing circumstances of your connection. You can also connect to your Exchange server over the Internet without the hassle of setting up a VPN. This makes remote access much simpler. Although it's not a part of Office, the much-improved Outlook Web Access (OWA) feature of Exchange Server 2003 includes nearly all of the capabilities of the stand-alone Outlook product -- an enhancement that road warriors will appreciate. Calendar features
Calendars, too, have come in for a bit of a facelift. If you're one of the many people juggling multiple email accounts, you'll appreciate the ability to display all of your calendars at once, as shown in Figure B. Outlook also offers colour-coding for different types of appointments and a more flexible set of calendar views.
Figure B
Junk mail tracking
With this version, Microsoft is making strides toward keeping clutter out of your mailbox. The junk mail blocking has been overhauled to work better (though we haven't seen details of the algorithm being used). You can read everything as plain text if HTML bothers you or strikes you as a security risk. Ad banners in HTML mail are blocked if the mail comes from your HotMail account. Web beacons (sometimes called Web bugs), which are sneaky images that can tell spammers if you are actually reading their mail, are automatically blocked. Other new features
A few other enhancements include a quicker way to flag messages for follow-up (and search folders to track flagged messages), meeting workspaces that let you initiate a SharePoint collaborative space directly from Outlook, pictures in your Contacts folder, and pervasive Unicode support.
