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The Living in Outlook series is about sharing tips and workflows around real-world scenarios. We’ll start the conversation with a topic – you can add to it by posting your tips and workflows in the comments!

If you read RSS feeds in Outlook like I do, you might notice that the default list view isn’t ideal for blogs written by a single person. Since the author is usually the same for my RSS feeds, I’d much rather have the subject of the article be the most prominent piece of information. So what’s my solution? To create a custom view for my RSS feed folders!

This is how my RSS feed articles are currently displayed:

And this is how they are displayed after I apply my custom view:

By switching the placement of the Subject and Author in the message list it’s easier for me to scan my news headlines and find the most interesting articles. If you want another way to see your RSS articles in Outlook, try this out!

Creating a custom view

1. To define a new view for your RSS feeds, start by clicking View | Current View | Define Views…
2. Click New… to create a new view:
3. Fill out the Create a New View dialog box… Rename the view (I chose to name mine “RSS”) Leave the default type on Table. And change the Can be used on option to All Mail and Post folders. Click OK.
4. Click on the Fields… button.
5. The only change you need to make here is the order in which the fields are displayed. Click Subject and then click Move Up, then click OK.
6. Now you’re ready to apply this view to your RSS feed folders! In one of your RSS folders, go to the View menu and select your new view (mine’s called RSS) and you’re done!

To use this view on other RSS folders, repeat Step 6 for each folder.

Do you use custom views? If so, let us know what works best for you!

Allie Bellew

Outlook Program Manager

Our friends over at Mactopia.com announced the release of the 12.1.4 update. According to their site, this fixes an issue from the 12.1.3 and scheduling meetings when an Entourage identity is configured with more than one mail account. Check it out here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx

- Joey Masterson

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On Thursday, 6 November, at 21:00 (9:00pm), get ready to rub shoulders with some of the world's most powerful IT Professionals and community influencers.

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Please use registration code: TEMCM

- The Exchange Team

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So, you're reading all sorts of good stuff in the Library in the Exchange TechCenter, when, all of a sudden, the Table of Contents in the left-hand pane disappears! Where the #*$! did it go? Calm down, and hit T on the keyboard. Whoa! It's back! Such a relief. But, hey, now you're thinking that all that extra space was kinda cool when the TOC was gone.you don't need no stinkin' TOC. What to do? That's right, just hit T! It's gone again! Hit T! It's back! Go forth and amaze your friends.

Check it out! http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996058.aspx

- Alison Hirsch

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When an IMAP account is configured in Outlook 2007, your tracking preferences are ignored and read receipts are returned when you delete items from the Junk E-mail folder.

Microsoft has received a large number of support cases that are caused either directly or indirectly because of this add-in. These include hangs, crashes, and leaks. One problem is the custom form and an updated form is available for download.

CA XOsoft Replication Option for Exchange is a disaster recovery solution that uses asynchronous real-time replication to provide cost-effective disaster recovery capabilities for Microsoft Exchange on 32- and 64-bit Windows standalone and cluster servers.

VBOffice Reporter is an easy to use tool for data analysis and reporting in Outlook. A single click allows you to see the number of hours planned for meetings the next month, expenses for a specific project in the last month, and many things more. Features include the ability to create reports for all tasks, calendar, and journal items. Create a report with a single click and then sent via e-mail or open it in Excel. Version 2. Trial available.

OLKeeper reliably prevents users from closing their Outlook and thus possibly missing reminders or e-mails. When you click the X button to close Outlook, OLKeeper asks you what to do: minimize, close or cancel. You will never again miss an important appointment or e-mail just because Outlook was accidentally closed or waste your time with unnecessary, long waits during Outlook restarts.

As part of the performance improvements we’ve made for Outlook 2007 SP2 beta, we’ve changed the way Outlook manages the lifecycle of the application. In the past, Outlook followed the best practices for Component Object Model (COM) servers and allowed clients of the Outlook server to control the lifecycle of Outlook. This caused a significant end-user side effect: often the user could not close Outlook because of lingering external references. This is confusing and frustrating for our users, and many users would often use Task Manager to terminate the Outlook process.

As a result of strong and long-standing customer feedback about the need to close Outlook and have Outlook stop running, Service Pack 2 changes the way Outlook closes, ensuring that the user’s intent to close Outlook is respected. These changes mean the way the Outlook COM server shuts down has changed significantly, which may impact solutions using the Outlook object model outside of the Outlook process.

Impact for Add-ins: None

If you’ve written an in-process add-in for Outlook this change does not affect you. The lifecycle of in-process add-ins and in-process COM references in Outlook 2007 has always been the same as the lifecycle of the application. When the user closes the last Outlook window and Outlook starts to shut down, add-ins are disconnected and references are released.

Add-ins can use the Quit event on the Application object to determine when Outlook will be closing down. After the Quit event is raised, add-ins will have their OnDisconnection method called, and then the add-in and Outlook will close.

Impact for Cross Process Solutions

Before Outlook 2007 SP2, Outlook would check for external (out of process) references on the COM Server objects and wait for those references to be released before Outlook would close. This would enable solutions that were depending on Outlook data to keep Outlook running until the references were released. This is common behavior for COM servers, but is unexpected behavior for end users, who expect that an application will close when they close the last window of the application (or at least reasonably soon after they close the last window).

Starting with Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2, Outlook will ignore external COM references when determining if Outlook should exit. When a user closes the last Outlook window, Outlook will start exiting the process: this involves raising the Quit event on the Application object, disconnect all add-ins, disconnecting external references, persisting in-memory changes to the disk, and then exiting. All external COM references will be disconnected immediately after the Quit event is raised on the Application object.

Because of the way COM works, when Outlook releases the external references, those objects become disconnected objects in cross process solutions. When a solution attempts to use the disconnected reference, an error will result from any call to the object (RPC_E_DISCONNECTED). Solutions that are not designed to handle this error may crash or otherwise misbehave. This will occur any time a solution attempts to use an object reference after Outlook has closed.

To work correctly with the new behavior in Outlook, your solution should listen for the Quit event on the Application object. When that event is raised, stop any work in progress using Outlook data, and release all Outlook references. Any remaining references after the solution returns from the Quit event will be disconnected.

While handling the Quit event, a solution should return from the event as quickly as possible. While a solution is working in the Quit event, Outlook may appear hung to the user and the operating system and the user may forcibly terminate Outlook instead of waiting for it to finish closing.

If your solution needs to access data from Outlook after the process has shutdown, it can do so by starting the process up again in UI-less mode by calling CoCreateInstance(). However, you should attempt to design your solution such that data from Outlook is only collected while Outlook is running. I’ll be blogging about an example of how to design a solution that works this way in an upcoming blog post.

Special Cases

While the text above describes the default, we realize that there are customers and solutions which will be negatively impacted by this change until the solution can be updated. To restore the old behavior, administrators can set a registry key to force Outlook to wait for all external references to be released before closing.

This registry key applies to Outlook 2007 SP2 beta, the registry key may change for the final release of SP2.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\Shutdown]
“AllowShutdownWithExternalReferences”=dword:00000000

We’ve also done work to ensure that when a solution uses CoCreateInstance and Outlook isn’t running, the right things happen. In those cases, Outlook will remain running in “headless mode” without any visible user interface. If the user launches Outlook, a new Outlook window will appear in the same session Outlook was already using. If the user closes that window, even though the process was started by a solution, Outlook will exit in the same manner as it would if the application was started by the user.

Summary

As part of a larger overall performance improvement effort in Outlook 2007 Service Pack 2, the team has invested a significant amount of time to improve the experience around closing Outlook. We’ve also made changes to ensure that Outlook boots faster and is more responsive all around.

I’m interested in your feedback on this new shutdown logic, and any thoughts or questions about how we can continue to improve this experience in the next Outlook release. Please leave a comment on this post and let me know what you have to say.