Given that a lot of software has reached the stage at which it's "good enough" for most users (many of whom never use more than 20 percent of a product's functionality), software manufacturers often struggle to persuade customers to upgrade to the latest release of their products. Even Microsoft has this problem, notably with well-established products such as Windows, Exchange Server, and Microsoft Office. Currently, many organizations are weighing the decision to upgrade to Office Outlook 2003. The following discussion might make the upgrade choice a bit easier.
Choosing to Upgrade
Outlook is the most common client used in corporate Exchange deployments, but it can also connect to other email servers, including Lotus Domino Server, Oracle Collaboration Server, any IMAP or POP3 server, and any HTTP server that supports WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV). Indeed, one of Microsoft's challenges is to maintain Outlook's ability to connect to many different email servers while deepening the ability of Exchange and Outlook to work well together. From Microsoft's perspective, it wouldn't make competitive sense for Outlook to work as well with Domino as it does with Exchange, yet until Microsoft released Outlook 2003, the company had never emphasized close collaboration between Outlook and Exchange. The products followed different release cycles and, at times, Microsoft seemed to have more interest in making Outlook an Internet client than in having it make the best use of Exchange. Microsoft's strategy changed with the coordinated release of Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003, and Outlook 2003 because Microsoft wanted customers to view the trio as a set of complementary products designed to work together out of the box. I began using beta versions of Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 in late 2002 and have become familiar with their many improvements, some of which are more important to the way I work than others.
Cached Exchange Mode
My favorite new Outlook 2003 feature is Cached Exchange mode, largely because I spend so much time on the road. I can now take along my complete mailbox (plus the Offline Address Book--OAB) and work more effectively than ever before. In Cached Exchange mode, Outlook synchronizes copies of all your mailbox folders (and any public folder favorites that you set up) to the offline folder store (OST). Earlier Outlook versions synchronized only selected folders--usually essential email folders such as the Inbox, Calendar, and Sent Items--to the OST.
The major advantage of having a complete copy of your mailbox in a local file is that you can work locally and remain insulated from any temporary network outages. Earlier versions of Outlook are sensitive to network interruptions, and users can experience frequent hangs as Outlook and Exchange swap remote procedure calls (RPCs) with each other, sometimes unsuccessfully. Outlook with Cached Exchange mode uses as many as four threads to synchronize with your mailbox, so if a mailbox change (such as a new message arriving in the Inbox) occurs on either the client or the server, Outlook can rapidly synchronize both levels. Outlook 2003 maintains a separate high-priority thread for operations that need to happen fast, such as sending messages. Also, if you're working in Cached Exchange mode and the network link fails, you can continue working, and as soon as the network is available again, Outlook automatically connects and synchronizes the mailbox. In earlier Outlook versions, a network failure meant users had to shut down and restart the client.
Smarter Networking
Outlook 2003 boasts many improvements to the way it connects across networks, such as smarter synchronization, attachment compression, and better buffer packing, which means that Outlook 2003 is less "chatty" than earlier versions in the way it communicates with Exchange. (It was always a wonder to me why synchronizing a few messages took so long and generated so much network traffic.) You also have more control over whether Outlook downloads only message headers or full items on different types of connections, as Figure 1 shows. On a DSL-style connection (which Outlook considers fast), you'll probably work as you do on a LAN and select Download Full Items, but you can use other options depending on network responsiveness. Outlook 2003 also displays its current connectivity state and the synchronization status on the status bar.
Outlook 2003 supports drizzle-mode synchronization, which means it downloads header information to the Inbox before it downloads the message body and any attachments. Along with the headers, Outlook downloads the first few lines of content to display in the autopreview pane. Drizzle-mode synchronization (the default setting) lets Outlook synchronize over low-speed, high-latency connections--functionality that's increasingly important as more devices become wireless enabled.
Another synchronization improvement is Outlook's ability to cope with corrupt items that it encounters during the synchronization process. In earlier Outlook versions, these items caused synchronization to hang, but Outlook 2003 skips the corrupt items and synchronizes the rest of the mailbox. Outlook 2003 also handles interruptions better than earlier versions because it starts resynchronizing at the last processed item rather than starting over after an error occurs.
With these networking-related improvements, Outlook 2003 generates less traffic on the wire and synchronization is smoother, but I've found one change that I dislike and that might present problems for some organizations. Outlook 2003 downloads a set of updates for the OAB daily. This behavior has valid reasoning behind it: If you have an outdated OAB, you can't address messages accurately and you might not be able to address some users at all if they don't appear in the copy of the OAB on your PC. However, large organizations might have megabytes of OAB updates that can take a long time to download, and Outlook starts to download the updates without first prompting the user. Fortunately, individuals can disable Outlook's automatic OAB-download behavior by setting the DownloadOAB REG_DWORD value to 0 in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Cached Mode registry subkey. The Microsoft article "How to configure how the Offline Address Book is downloaded when you use Outlook 2003 in Cached Exchange Mode" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=823580) discusses this and other options for modifying Outlook 2003's OAB-download behavior.
One other OAB limitation is the inability to see new entries to the Global Address List (GAL) until Exchange incorporates them into the OAB through the OAB-generation process. This process runs on a nominated server nightly (typically at 4:00 a.m.) to build a complete OAB and a differences file, which contains the updates since Exchange built the last OAB. Exchange holds these files in a compressed format in a system public folder that it replicates to other servers within the organization so that clients can download a copy of the OAB from a local server.
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