Outlook

For many, Microsoft Outlook reigns supreme when it comes to email, scheduling and contact management. However, Outlook can be a pricey way to accomplish mundane, but critical office tasks, and alternatives are available, all at a price anyone could love – free!

With many business users reliant upon Outlook for all their e-mail, calendaring, and contact needs, it can be quite traumatic when Outlook's .pst file goes south. Outlook 2007 and 2010 are quite robust in this regard, but stuff happens. If hard drive sectors fail, Office's scanpst.exe may not be able to fix the file. Advanced Outlook Repair ($250, free feature-limited demo) professes to be able to recover more items from damaged .pst files than anyone--or your money back.

Microsoft's just-released beta of the Outlook Social Connector aims to solve a formidable problem: How to retain Outlook's centrality when social networking sites and services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have become increasingly important. It largely succeeds.

Do you struggle with PST files? You're not alone. Robert Sparnaaij, author of the popular HowTo-Outlook Web site calls managing PST files "true hell." You break roaming if you store them on local drives, but you shouldn't store them on network drives. Investing in a proper server-side archiving solution that allows you to disable the use of PST files will earn back the investment quite quickly.

Efficiently enter information into your Contact database and Calendar with Anagram. Plus utilities for updating your Facebook status, managing your Tweets, and detaching files with ease.

While I like Outlook, its old-school design can be a bit frustrating to me. Enter Xobni, an Outlook plug-in, which vastly extends the functionality of Outlook.

After promising that people can use Outlook "seamlessly" with the Gmail component of its Apps suite, Google is toning down those expectations.

By far, the most common Outlook question we get at my company is how to free the application from the shackles of a full mailbox. If it has reached its max size, the ability to send e-mails is the first to go. For any corporate worker, that’s akin to not having a computer at all.

Although Microsoft Outlook is a great product in the enterprise where it's safely tethered to the ubiquitous Exchange Server, the product leaves a lot to be desired in the non-Exchange world. From PST corruption to outright weirdness, I don't want to spend more time managing my mail client than I spend managing my actual mail. In the hunt for a new client for home, I found and fell in love with Windows Live Mail.

Here's how to turn off Outlook's email alerts for new messages. Plus, you can set up custom rules to generate alerts only when important people send messages.

Sage Software Tuesday shipped the 11th edition of its customer contact management software, ACT, tightening the product's integration with Microsoft Outlook.

Here's how to create an email template in Outlook 2007 for emails that you commonly send out.