Office 2010 Beta: Outlook 2010 Shines

Now that Office 2010 Beta is officially available for download to TechNet and MSDN subscribers, here's a quick shout out to the Outlook team for what's shaping up to be an excellent, super-impressive, fabulous new release of Microsoft Outlook!

I've always preferred web-based apps, including Outlook Web Access (OWA) in the past, and Outlook Web App (still OWA!) in Exchange 2010. Like most IT pros, I use many different computers during the course of a day - laptops, desktops, servers, virtual machines, and RDP sessions. OWA is a natural fit for this type of usage.

But Outlook 2010 has won me over for its user experience, features, and user experience (in that order). Web-based e-mail apps/providers, with the exception of OWA 2010 of course, do not provide a comparable experience, and although a lot of emailing is now done on "Exchange ActiveSync-capable" mobile devices, if you have to use email on a real computer, there's no better way to email than Outlook 2010.

Want to check out how cool Outlook 2010 is? There's a video for that. Play it full screen to clearly see Outlook 2010 quick demos.