How to get useful extras for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 without ‘social’ connections.
Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector adds useful features to Outlook, even if you have no interest in the links to Facebook, Windows Live Messenger etc.
The social connector adds the Outlook 2010 People Pane to two earlier versions of Outlook. While we have some misgivings about the People Pane there are some useful features in it.
It provides quick access to emails, attachments and events related to the current contact (eg the sender of an email).
In this article we’ll show you some of the nifty features in the social connector / people pane for Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003 as well as Outlook 2010.
Setup
Outlook 2010 have the ‘people pane’ in-built and don’t need to do anything else. However there are downloads to update and add social connections to Outlook 2010.
Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 users need to download some free extras from Microsoft:
Windows Search v4 is also required for Windows XP or Vista users (it comes with Windows 7). For Windows XP or Vista SP1. There’s no easy way to tell which version of Windows Search you have installed (don’t get us started about the documentation of this product). Look in your Control Panel | Programs list. If in doubt, just try installing it and see what happens.
After all the downloads are installed, restart Outlook and allow Windows Search time to index Outlook items. Windows XP users have an ‘Index Now’ option denied Vista and Win7 users.
Using the People Pane
Once you start Outlook look at the bottom of the reading/preview pane and you’ll see a new bar. This is the minimized version of the People Pane.
Click on the arrow on the right or just double-click on the bar to open up the full version.
I’m afraid you’ll just have to ignore the silhouette images. Microsoft is curiously obsessed with photos in this feature and there’s no direct way to get rid of them.
Once Windows Search has indexed your Outlook content the tabs on right will fill up with useful information related to that contact (most commonly the person who sent you that email).
You can see, reading down the tabs:
- all items
- news feed updates and RSS feeds (this applies to social connections)
- messages
- email attachments
- meetings
- status updates (again, applies to social connections)
The first, third, fourth and fifth tabs work well for any contact/email sender without any social connection stuff.
The ‘All items’ and ‘Messages’ tabs are handy to quickly find past messages from that person – there was no easy way to do that until now.
In short: give the ‘Outlook Social Connector’ a try. Even if you don’t bother with social networking there’s some useful feature available and it costs you nothing. A rare boon for users of past Office versions who are usually ignored by Microsoft – so enjoy it.
