Summary

The Outlook client is a very versatile client that most people use just for opening email messages, creating Calendar appointments, and sending messages. However, the Outlook client provides a whole lot more for organizations looking to expand the capabilities of the client and to provide group Calendar sharing, secure remote communications, and better information-management functionality with Outlook and Exchange.

Although hundreds of features were built into previous versions of the Outlook client, the new Outlook 2003 client adds several new ones regarding user productivity and group communications in an Exchange Server 2003 environment. Some of the new features include quick flags, the capability to propose new meeting times, the capability to associate items with a specific contact, and new message search capabilities.

Also new with Outlook 2003 are the tools that come with the Office 2003 Resource Kit. The new Resource Kit tools provide custom installation capabilities to automate the installation of Outlook either through Group Policies or as integrated through other scripted installation tools.

Security is another major enhancement to Outlook 2003, with several new improvements for encrypted client-to-server communications using RPC over HTTP, the capability to add security to specific messages, and the capability to set security for an entire mailbox. Also part of the secured client function in Outlook 2003 is the capability to set up junk mail filters that allow or deny incoming and outgoing messages between users.

Finally, a new Cached Mode method of access enables a user to manage mail, Calendar appointments, and other content within Outlook, regardless of whether that user is connected to Exchange. Cached mode access provides managed connectivity for unreliable remote access connections and improves the user experience when connection to an Exchange server is interrupted by either network failures or a temporary connection interruption.

All of the new capabilities of Outlook 2003, as well as the capability to leverage existing features in earlier versions of Outlook, provide an improved user experience within an Exchange Server 2003 environment.