Improving Your Outlook

Creating a custom Outlook Today page for your organization can help the members of your organization use Outlook to its fullest potential. Each organization and individual has different needs. If you check your stocks each morning, you might want a link to launch a Web page that lists your current stock prices. If you routinely access an HTML email server, such as Hotmail, every morning and don't want to read your Hotmail in Outlook, you can configure a button to launch a browser and point it to Hotmail's Web page.

Other types of items you can add to your Outlook Today page include

• Third-party ActiveX controls that display Web content, such as a news ticker or a local weather forecast

• Buttons to create emails to individuals inside and outside your organization

• Corporate logos or even pictures of your children

• Links to search engines such as Yahoo! and Google

• Links to sites on your corporate intranet

All of these types of changes are possible using HTML code. If you can dream it in HTML, you can probably implement it in a customized Outlook Today page. Some examples of customized Outlook Today pages are shown in Figures 8.15 and 8.16.

Figure 8.15. You can create a customized Outlook Today page to display reporting information from your corporate SQL server.

Figure 8.16. You can use Outlook Today to display your company logo and link to sites on your corporate intranet.

As long as you've made a backup of your original Outlook Today file and have also made a backup of the Registry key that must be changed to associate your custom Outlook Today page with the Outlook Today folder, you should experiment with different elements in your Outlook Today page until you find a combination of elements that works best for you.