| Microsoft Outlook is well on its way to becoming the most widely used email program in
the world (for good or for worse, as recent Outlook security scares testify).
This book by Tom Syroid and Bo Leuf is a must-have for anyone who uses Outlook
2000 and entertaining reading to boot. But it's essentially a power user manual and not an administrator's
guide, though there is a lot of useful information for administrators to
read also.
Like all O'Reilly "Nutshell" books, this book is clear, concise, and covers both the basics
while also digging deep to uncover non-intuitive ways of doing things and poorly
documented features users may find useful.
The chapter on Installing Outlook covers the three different installation modes (PIM,
IMO, and CW) and includes a good discussion of Outlook profiles. I would
have preferred however if this chapter (and some others in this book) were
written more from the perspective of the system
administrator than the power user, as it is unlikely that even a power
user would be installing Outlook in CW mode in an enterprise environment.
I would also have liked information about unattended and SMS installs in
this chapter.
Chapter 3 is a nice chapter with under-the-hood details of Outlook information stores,
address books, forms, and other stuff. Chapters 4 and 5 cover customizing the Outlook
interface and mail editor.
Chapters 6 to 11 then cover in detail the menu options of the mail, calendar, contacts,
tasks, notes, and journal portions of Outlook.
Chapters 12 to 18 cover more advanced topics like importing and exporting data,
archiving and backing up Outlook information, using the Inbox repair Tool, collaborating
with Outlook, sending and receiving digitally signed messages, synchronizing Outlook
with the Palm platform, how Outlook integrates with Exchange, and Outlook and VBA.
Some of these advanced topics are obviously useful for administrators. But the main
focus of the book is on the end-user, and the chapter on Outlook and Exchange is only a
brief introduction to a complex subject.
Once nice touch about the book is that tips are numbered sequentially and there are
almost 200 of them. An advanced user might skip through the book just looking at the
tips and pick up a wealth of useful information.
I give the book 
stars out of five. It fills a niche, but I'm still looking for that magic book
that covers the deployment, management, maintenance, and troubleshooting of Outlook
97/98/2000 on Exchange 5.0/5.5/2000 using SMS 1.2/2.0/unattend.txt/cloning on
Windows NT4.0/2000 and covers every variation of the subject (equivalent to 3x3x4x2 =
72 books in one). Why? Because that is what the real world is like from an
administrator's point of view.
Here is where you can find this book on Amazon.
|
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