Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 12. What You Need to Know to Use Outlook at Home

In This Chapter

• Discovering and choosing ISPs

• Setting up an account

• Establishing directory services

• Preparing for multiple users

Working at home is different from working in an office (but you knew that). Sure, working in your bathrobe is pretty unusual in big companies, but telecommuters have to do without the huge network, multiple phone lines, and standing army of computer gurus that many office workers take for granted. That's why Outlook works a bit differently for the home user than it does for the corporate user — and this chapter shows the home user how to get the most from those differences. (If you use Outlook in a large corporation, you may want to skip to Chapter 14, which focuses on using Outlook in big business.)

Investigating an ISP

If you use a computer at home, you probably send and receive e‐mail through an outside service. It might be your cable company, your phone company, or a service that your computer dials up over the telephone. The general term for the kind of outfit that provides this service is Internet service provider, or ISP. ISPs do more than exchange e‐mail messages for you; an ISP also provides the Internet connection that enables your browser to access and display pages from the World Wide Web and enables you to do nearly anything that you can do on the Internet.

Online services, such as America Online, EarthLink, and MSN (the Microsoft Network) function as ISPs, but they also offer a variety of other ...