wo years ago, I was having dinner with a Microsoft product manager when I started to tell him about my fantasy program.
''What I need,'' I said, ''is a system that tracks all of my communications and contacts in one single database. It should have my address book, my calendar, my things-to-do list, and my e-mail. But most important, everything should be integrated. I want to be able to click on the address book, and instantly find all of the e-mail from that person. I want to be able to look at my calendar, click on an appointment, and have the computer automatically dial the phone. There is a lot of structure buried inside this information; I want the computer to understand that structure, rather than forcing me to be a file clerk.''
My dinner companion smiled. ''That sounds just like a program that we are working on,'' he said. ''It's called Outlook. It's part of Office 97.''
Months later, when I got my copy of Office 97, Outlook was the first program I started up. It looked like everything I had been told it would be. But I soon became disappointed.
Outlook was slow, difficult to use, and not particularly good at sending Internet e-mail. And weird bugs kept cropping up. I tried using it for a few days, and then went back to Eudora for my e-mail and Bill Amend's FoxTrot Student Planner for my calendar. I keep my contacts using a little program that I wrote for myself.
A few months later, another group at Microsoft delivered another mail program with a similar name: Outlook Express. Bundled with Internet Explorer 4, Outlook Express was everything Outlook wasn't. The program was fast and easy to use, and it supported many Internet standards such as POP (to download e-mail), IMAP (for reading e-mail on remote servers), LDAP (remote directories), and S/MIME (for sending encrypted mail). I started using Outlook Express last summer; it has been my mail reader ever since.
One of the main strengths Microsoft has as a company is a strong sense of internal competition combined with the ability to share technology. The programmers who wrote Outlook looked at Outlook Express and decided they could do better. They then took the best features from Outlook Express, copied the code, and started developing Outlook 98. The Outlook team finished its work last month. You can download the program for free until June 30 from http://www.
microsoft.com/outlook.
Outlook 98 is a complicated program to use, but it is easily the most powerful Internet e-mail system available. Start it up and you'll see a special page called ''Outlook Today,'' which compiles your unread e-mail messages, upcoming appointments, and things-to-do list. Dig a little deeper and you'll discover a filter to remove junk mail from your In box, plus tools for changing the program's display, an ''auto preview'' mode that shows you the first three lines of your e-mail messages, and a complete fax system.
Like my mythical e-mail system, Outlook 98 lets you easily search for all e-mail messages or appointments that involve a particular individual. You can also categorize e-mail messages, appointments, or people by group, and search those as well. Outlook 98 has an ''archive'' feature, which lets you move old mail messages or calendar appointments to a separate file that you can put on removable disk or tape. And there is full support for both the 3Com Palm Pilot and Microsoft Windows CE, in case you want to copy your address book or contacts to a small portable device.
Nevertheless, I'm still troubled by the new Outlook. For starters, it is still significantly slower than Outlook Express. The program's IMAP implementation is still pretty weak - a problem for schools and businesses that have standardized on this system. There's no support for Usenet News (so for that, you've still got to use Outlook Express). And then there is the intangible problem: When I use the program, I don't feel I'm in control of my data.
My biggest complaint about Outlook 98 is that it doesn't work the way I do. When I am home, I like to use my desktop machine. When I travel, I like to use my laptop. But because I don't have a Microsoft Exchange server, there's no easy way to synchronize my mailboxes, address book, and calendar between my desktop and laptop systems.
Around the same time Microsoft released Outlook 98, Qualcomm released Eudora Planner, an integrated address book and calendar program. Unlike Outlook, Planner has no e-mail component; you must use it with your current e-mail system. Eudora Planner is based on Now Contact and Now Up To Date, both of which Qualcomm acquired last year.
Planner is everything Outlook isn't: simple, fast, and easy to use. It's also multiplatform - it runs on Macintosh. And it's easy to set up a Eudora Planner server so that many people in a single work group can have a shared calendar and contact management system.
Unfortunately, Planner is rough around the edges. The program crashed on me several times. The documentation is sketchy. And the license management system is completely arcane: You need to type in a 30-digit serial number and a 10-digit activation code.
The biggest problem with Planner is that there is no integration with Eudora Pro, Qualcomm's popular e-mail system. It really doesn't make sense to have two sets of address books, one for your e-mail system and one for contact management, but that's what you have to do with the Eudora product line.
I'm still waiting for the perfect e-mail, calendar, things-to-do list, and contact management system. In the meantime, I'll probably keep using Outlook Express, FoxTrot, and my own ingenuity.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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