Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Big‐Time Collaboration with Outlook

In This Chapter

• Collaborating with Microsoft Exchange

• Understanding all those Address Books

• Using public folders

• Accessing Outlook through the Web

Microsoft is a big company that writes big programs for big companies with big bucks. So, as you'd expect, some parts of Outlook are intended for people at big companies. Big companies that use Outlook usually have a network that's running a program called Microsoft Exchange Server in the background. Exchange Server works as a team with Outlook to let you do what you can't do with Outlook alone. Outlook users on an Exchange Server can look at the calendar of another employee, or give someone else the power to answer e‐mail messages on that person's behalf, or do any of a host of handy tasks right from a single desktop.

Many features of Microsoft Exchange Server look as if they're just a part of Outlook, so most Exchange Server users have no idea that any program other than Outlook is involved. In practical terms, it really doesn't matter whether you know the technical difference between Outlook and Exchange Server; what's important is that Outlook and Exchange together can tackle a lot of tasks that Outlook can't do as well alone.

Collaborating with Outlook's Help

If your company is like most others, then you spend a lot of time in meetings — and even more figuring out when to hold meetings and agreeing on what to do when you're not having meetings. Outlook has some tools for planning meetings and ...