Two of the features added by the Outlook add-on are reminders that check each email message when the user clicks the send button in the email program. The first reminder will check if a subject line has been added to the email. If that is not the case it will display a small popup window notifying the user of the missing subject line. The user then has the option to cancel sending the email to go back into editing mode and add a subject line or send the email anyway.

The second reminder will look for keywords in the email body that suggest that an attachment should have been added to the email message. If it finds a keyword but not attachment it will notify the user as well.

The last feature that is added by the Microsoft Outlook 2007 Essentials add-in is the ability to print a selection of the email message. This is done by right-clicking an email, selecting Outlook Essentials Mail Viewer, selecting the part of the email to be printed and right-clicking again to print the selection.

The Microsoft Outlook add-in might be useful for some users who either want to be extra careful to never forget to add attachments and subject lines to their email messages or who want to have the option to print a selection of emails.

The general responsiveness of Outlook 2007 has been increased by reducing the I/O disk usage processes and UI response times. Startup has been improved by moving long operations from the initial startup while shutdown time was decreased by making Outlook exit predictable. Finally the folder and view switching benefits from improved view rendering and folder switching routines.

The update is currently classified as a hotfix meaning that users will have to request it by providing their email address on a form at the Microsoft website. Users who do use Microsoft Outlook 2007 as their main email client will benefit from the update to a large extent. Startup time might be slower during first startup because of a one-time data structure upgrade.

Microsoft has updated their Mailbox Storage Size Guidance to reflect the performance and responsiveness improvements when utilizing Cached Exchange Mode with respect to mailbox/OST sizes:

• Up to 5 gigabytes (GB): This size should provide a good user experience on most hardware.
• Between 5 GB and 10 GB: This size is typically hardware dependent. Therefore, if you have a fast hard disk and much RAM, your experience will be better. However, slower hard drives, such as drives that are typically found on portable computers or early generation solid state drives (SSDs), experience some application pauses when the drives respond.
• More than 10 GB: This size is where short pauses begin to occur on most hardware.
• Very large, such as 25 GB or larger: This size increases the frequency of the short pauses, especially while you are downloading new e-mail. Alternatively, you can use Send/Receive groups to manually sync your mail.

The service pack for Outlook 2007 contains additional improvements for components like the Calendar or Outlook search among others. Interested users can read up on the Outlook 2007 SP1 update by visiting the extensive Microsoft Knowledgebase article and an official blog post covering the release announcement.

Lookout indexes all Microsoft Outlook contents and provides a toolbar to search all emails, news feeds, appointments and attachments. It basically can index all contents of Microsoft Outlook to power the search. Advanced users will like the option to exclude folders from being indexed.

The Microsoft Outlook search add-in Lookout integrates itself nicely into Microsoft Outlook 2003 but needs a small tweak before it will work in Outlook 2007.

cd %SYSTEMROOT%\assembly\GAC
rename Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OLD

To reverse the changes one would issue the command

cd %SYSTEMROOT%\assembly\GAC
rename Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.OLD Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook

The options of the Microsoft Outlook search add-on are quite extensive. It is possible to define a time range for the indexing process and to specify how fast new items should be added to the index.

Lookout will automatically index the contents of attachments with the endings txt, doc, html, htm, xls and ppt. My Document folders can be added to the search as well as additional files, folders and Microsoft Outlook folders.

Lookout is a fast lightweight Microsoft Outlook search add-in that’s way faster than other solutions like Google’s Desktop Search tool.